


Everyone Gets Here Eventually

by hermitreunited



Series: Would You Leave The Seat Empty? [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Afterlife AU, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming Out, Dave's POV, Discussions of Suicide, Hurt/Comfort, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, M/M, Panic Attacks, angsting about homophobia and coming out, fairly brief but also fairly intense violence, implications of Klaus whump? is that something?, it is canon typical though given the part where the horror is on the show, it really is a happy ending I promise because this is a story about, takes place mainly after season 1 and some kind of hand-waved not-apocalypse, the bundle of content warnings that are inherent to Klaus as a person, the ship that taught me that love is real and the gays invented it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-24 21:36:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 47,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20712926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hermitreunited/pseuds/hermitreunited
Summary: At first he thinks it’s a dream, but it’s not long before he realizes that’s not right. If Dave were dreaming, Klaus would be here. It’s okay, though. Everything’s okay here. It’s weird, though, about Klaus.Well, what isn’t weird about Klaus? But. You know. Dave just wants to know. What happened?aka,In the afterlife, all it takes to be with your loved ones is for both of you to want to be together. But for some reason, Dave hasn’t been able to reunite with Klaus, so he’ll do what it takes to find him.





	1. Chapter 1

At first he thinks it’s a dream, but it’s not long before he realizes that’s not right. If Dave were dreaming, Klaus would be here.

‘Not long’ is relative. Or just - time doesn’t matter here. Or it doesn’t exist, or something. It’s weird. The time part is weird, anyway, most of the rest of it is nice. Really, really nice.

Life is in soft focus, somehow, and only ever the best bits. He’s back in the states, somewhere nameless and non-specific, but definitely back home, and he’s got his own little house, where he makes eggs and toast in the mornings and goes out to garden in the afternoons and it never gets above 75° and he has a beer on the porch as the evening falls and he watches neighbors walking their dogs down the tree-lined lane until after the fireflies come flitting to life and it’s never loud or dirty or painful. It’s just really nice.

Some days he thinks he would like to have a dog, and some days he does. The serenity is lovely, truly it is, but some days it’s a little lonely. Day after day for however long 'not long’ is, smiling out from his cozy home at the passers-by is his only interaction with another living soul.

Although, he’s pretty sure ‘living’ isn’t the right word. 

That knowledge isn’t distressing, not like he might have expected. Being dead. Just like the music that always sounds like it’s coming from across the way, filtering beneath the hush of birdsong and leaves, everything’s sort of muted here, even emotions. Maybe especially emotions, or the negative ones, anyway. 

Dave thinks about that, when his hands get busy working the soil. His brain finds something to turn over, too, and he’ll think about how it is that the worst part about being dead isn’t concern about the things in life he will miss out on (or has already missed out on, more accurately), or even the facts of how he died, smothered in mud with a crater in his chest pumping his life away, slippery and dark and too much, too fast. The worst part about his death is who was there to witness it. Dave wishes he hadn’t.

It’s okay, though. Everything’s okay here. Tragedy can only be bittersweet; what once was agonizing now simply makes him pensive. There’s this instinctual knowledge that is a constant cushioning comfort, caressing every moment - everyone will get here, eventually. It’s soft and lovely and kind here, and everyone will come to know that tenderness. 

And he’ll be able to see him again.

He sees Powloski again, before he finds anyone else. Powloski finds Dave, really, because Dave never even thought to venture beyond his cream-colored fence posts. 

“It’s a whole world out there, Katz,” Powloski exclaims. “Bigger than the whole world, probably. Everyone who’s ever lived, spread out however they want, and you can travel to visit any of it as quick as you want. And you’ve stayed in the suburbs planting peonies.” 

“What I’m hearing is that you can’t tell the difference between peonies and marigolds.”

Powloski roars with laughter. “No, I sure as hell cannot! That’s got to be the fruitiest thing you’ve ever said, and I’ve heard you go on and on about Sal Mineo."

Powloski is one to talk. He was the biggest flirt on the base, lavishing the nurses with his loud attention and his fellows soldiers with quieter but no less robust attraction. The two of them had spent some time canoodling together in the earlier days of Dave’s tour, but he’d come to realize that even in a war, the kind of love he’s looking for is steady and deep. Powloski, on the other hand, feeds off of novelty, which means he has the best stories, and he’s got an entertainer’s soul, which means he’s always more than willing to share.

He’ll throw his whole body into descriptive motion when he's telling a story, like during the dramatic retelling of a night when he’d shared Grillo’s tent for spirited little while, and when he went to return to his own, he’d accidentally busted in on Oscar instead.

“‘What’s going on?’ Oscar’s asking me because he thinks we’re under attack or something. I’m telling him not to worry, but he keeps saying, ‘What happened? What’s happened?’ So I have to say, ‘It’s not Charlie, Oscar, it was just me having a screw.’ His face when he hears that!” Powloski shakes his head. “He was just a kid out there. Lucky for me, too, that he was a fucking new guy or he would have blown my face off soon as I barged in on him. Not that it really mattered, in the end, I guess. Couple of months.” He shrugs. It’s so easy to shrug about things here.

He’s not the tallest guy, but his personality always made him so big. He never spoke so much as bellowed, but the more time they spend together over here, Dave comes to see the smaller side of him, too.

On a quieter night, Powloski talks about Julia, one of the nurses, who was older than all of them, who had been there longer, who knew more than they ever would, and who would not put up with one single iota of bullshit.

“She was the toughest person I ever met out there, man.” He’s drinking scotch tonight. He swirls the glass and watches the whirlpool. “I wanted to ask her to marry me.”  
If they were elsewhere, if they weren’t here where even sadness can be soothing, they would find a way to joke. They’d break the tension with a jeer about how she wouldn’t have married Powloski’s sorry ass anyway, but there isn’t any tension to break here. There’s just the quiet humming of a tranquil summer night, and something else. Something that puts Dave in the mind to finally ask what he’s both wanted and not wanted to know since Powloski first came around.

“What about Hargreeves?” he says into his own drink. _Hargreeves._ Like Dave hadn’t kissed the man so hard and then so soft that he forgot his own name, and like Dave doesn’t know that Powloski knows that.

Distancing. Being careful. Old habits.

“Your boy Klaus?” 

Dave bites his lip to hold back the smile, but he doesn’t succeed and he doesn’t need to anymore. It sure does sound nice, out loud, like that.

“I wish!” Powloski says. “But you know from the minute he arrived, that kid only had eyes for you.”

It’s not the warm air or the alcohol that flushes his face. But, “That’s not really what I was talking about. I just wondered - well.” 

It’s not hard to do anything here. It is hard to ask this.

Powloski shifts in his seat. He knows what Dave is trying to ask. They’d both been too near this exact unbearable conversation, countless times.  
“I don’t know.” He saves Dave the question. “He went MIA right after… The last time I saw you was the last time I saw either of you.” He throws back the rest of his drink. It’s fine. There’s plenty more.

“Oh.” Dave finishes his drink, too.

It’s weird, though, about Klaus. Well, what wasn’t weird about Klaus? 

But it’s weird to think that he disappeared. He was a lucky one; ever since that time with the landmine where he’d been the only survivor, the unit had adopted him as their charm, like he cast some kind of protection on those around him. It was always weird when your good luck charm ran out of luck, so that must have been rough on the men.

And. 

You know. 

Dave just wants to know. What happened?

This place gives him what he wants before he even knows to ask for it. He scratches his retriever’s head and thinks as loud as he can about Klaus and about how much he wants to know what happened to Klaus and if, wherever he is now, if Klaus is okay. He thinks, with as much fervor as he can pack into his thoughts, that what he wants is for Klaus to be okay.

He doesn’t know if it works like that.

He thinks that he didn’t get a long life and he didn’t get an easy death and if any of that means anything to the scales of fate, he’d like to trade whatever he’s worth for Klaus to be okay.

Not that he needs to be worried for Klaus. Because it’s true, Klaus has always had an impressive, almost uncanny, sort of resilience.

That time Klaus didn’t die, it was three weeks in. Not really long enough for Dave to be as affected as he was, seeing four dead bodies in the blast area but being particularly distraught by seeing that Klaus was one of them. He told himself, ‘Oh well, that probably wasn’t going to go anywhere anyway and that’s that,’ and he told himself that he hadn’t gotten _that_ connected anyway in such a short time, but his weighted stomach proved that was a lie. 

Klaus was unmoving on the ground, one hand splayed across his frozen chest and his face half sunk in the mud. He was pale under the dirt and blood, which turned out not to be his. Splattered on from the others, apparently. No matter how often they’d seen it, the young soldiers still all needed to take a somber beat before they went to collect their friends, which was when Dave noticed Klaus’ index finger twitch.

Dave’s feet carried him to his side before he managed to get out Hargreeves’ name. Klaus’ eyes hadn’t opened but his forehead creased in a grimace, and his left hand pulled shakily out from under debris to flutter next to his head, like he’d be covering his ears if he could stand the touch.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Klaus whispered, eyes still pressed tightly closed. “I’m fine.”

It was stupid how little Dave was fine, given he’d only met the guy less than a month ago. And given how many other people he’d had to witness be not fine in not too much longer than that. 

“You’re okay?” Dave latched on to the hand still prone on Klaus’ chest and held on tight. Klaus finally tore his eyes open and looked up at him, disoriented like he hadn’t quite fully returned yet from someplace acutely distant. But he managed to come back into himself and jerk a few small nods. Somehow it felt like Klaus was the one asking the question, so Dave said it again, firmly. “You’re okay.”

“Okay.” Klaus’ voice was hoarse but Dave was weak in the knees himself with gratitude to be hearing it.

He squeezed Klaus’ hand and then realized there needed to be an explanation for this that wasn’t glaringly obvious infatuation. “Come on,” he said, shifting his grasp so he could use it to help pull Klaus to his feet. Klaus still wavered so harshly that he bent almost in half and nearly fell back to the ground face-first, but Dave held him steady.

He couldn’t really do anything to help with the way Klaus lost his voice. As he hyperventilated in quick, quiet little spasms, as his gaze swept across the corpses of the other men. As he stared at the hand he pulled away from his ear, coated in blood that could at best only be identified as ‘somebody’s.’

Clapping a hand on Klaus’ shoulder, Dave told him again, “You’re going to be okay.” The tangible helpfulness of this gesture was debatable. But then, as now, the only thing Dave was able to do was to put the hope out there in the universe and try his best to confidently believe it.

The other thing about Klaus, though, is that Powloski says that once a person is here, if you both want to, you can find each other, just by wishing. Powloski’s surprised they haven’t found each other yet.

So is it that Klaus isn’t here, or that he doesn’t want to see him?

Dave’s mother moves into a house across the street. She looks exactly as beautiful as he remembered when he was crouched face-flat in the bush, and her potato kugel tastes even better than he remembered.

His tendency towards quiet solitude comes from his dad. His mom likes bustle, she likes to chat with the neighbors and stroll through town to find new neighbors to chat with. She pulls Dave out to walk with her sometimes, which is how Dave learns that he sort of knows the people all around him.

Mrs. Hughes, the librarian from the big public library where he spent his Wednesday afternoons, lives on the other side of the park. Mr. Gorsky, a friend of his father’s, keeps chickens and rabbits in his lush backyard, one street over. The person living on Dave’s right is the same kid who lived next door until Dave was five. He doesn’t really remember Pete from back then, but they’d brushed up against each other in life. Everyone here did. There’s something poetic and majestic about that but he’s always been more of a reader than a writer. He doesn’t pursue it.

It may not be a real town, but in a lot of ways it behaves like one. No one has to have a job, but plenty of folks like to work, spend their timeless days busy and sociable and with a purpose. There’s a big, airy building at the center of town where his mom takes a class in watercolors and teaches one on bread-making herself. Turns out there is truth in that saying about it never being too late to learn new things.

“No time like the present,” his mom says, a phrase she said so much in life that it was practically her motto. Now she says it like it’s a special inside joke, but of course everyone here is on the inside for that one. 

She tells him that she’s thinking of taking up piano, too. She’d always wanted to play an instrument - Dave’s dad could play so many, and she’s hoping to surprise him with a song when he joins them.

Dave’s walking with her to her class, carrying the new art kit she’d excitedly put together. Paints brush up against chalk and pastel inside the lined wicker basket. He twists his wrist back and forth and it swings around above his knees. “Do you miss him?” he asks. “Dad.”  
She never seems to have a problem talking about him, casually mentions him in conversations all the time and never trips over his name. It’s literally the opposite of your loved one dying, Dave knows this, but sometimes it feels the same. To Dave it does.

“Well, of course I’m looking forward to seeing him again,” she says, and that’s the thing, isn’t it? “I’m not saying I want him to hurry it up - he can take his time down there, keep on spoiling your sister’s children, but, oh, of course there are things up here I want to share with him. We shared everything, for so long.” She catches hold of his hand. “Longer than you were alive.”

It’s not that her tone is empty of sorrow, but it’s in the distance, somehow. Acceptance is in the foreground. Maybe that’s less metaphorical than he thinks. Maybe the misery gets left behind, a landmark in the town they all passed through before they got here. But Dave thinks sometimes that it’s closer for him than the others, and he’s not sure why, or how.

He has his suspicions though. About the why.

His mom squeezes his hand. “But we’ll have so much time together. We’ll see him again, soon enough.”

Yeah.

They do. His father moves in with his mom and all three of them go on walks together. Their happiness isn’t loud; it’s simply complete and so comfortable that sometimes it’s almost overwhelming.

So sometimes Dave will go for walks by himself. Getting out and about with his mom broke him of what turned out to be a self-imposed house arrest. He’ll stroll around the little town, breeze sprinkled with drifting spring blossoms one day and dry snow dust the next, whichever Dave prefers. 

He never brushes up against a city limit but still feel sure that he’s seen the whole place, a contained circle without a border. At the center is an open space, just like the historic downtown main square in his hometown, with a fountain and a gazebo and a bandstand, ringed by various community buildings. Spiraling out from there are long streets of pretty houses and little parks.

One of the community buildings is a library, impossibly endless on the inside. He’ll run into Mrs. Hughes there sometimes, but more often he’ll see Lewis, a kid that he knew when they were in elementary school together. Lewis’ nose had always been stuck in a book, even as an 8-year-old, and now he’s decided that he’s going to read every book, ever. 

He gets really excited about the part where he’ll never actually complete this goal. “There’s always more being written!” he’ll say, brainy motormouth starting to go too fast for Dave to catch all of it. “And, if you think about it, we’re hardly missing out on anything, because you can read about thousands more lives than the sole one that you got to live.”

It’s during one of these conversations that Dave realizes that there’ll be books about the war, probably there are plenty already. Lewis hasn’t been able to bring himself to read any yet, but he says he’s looking forward to when he is up for it. 

“Like I’m saying, we were there, but we could only see it from our tiny point of view. Besides,” he says, wry humor flattening out his voice, “we never got to find out how it ends.”

Which is true. But Dave isn’t sure that it really matters. Over the course of literally forever, he’ll probably change his mind, but for now, he’ll steer clear. Thinking about any of that still gives him a weird pain in his chest, a feeling that seems like it shouldn’t be possible over here. 

Part of him wants to ask Lewis to keep an eye out, to let Dave know if he ever reads a book about a Klaus Hargreeves, but it’s such a dumb, lovesick long shot that he keeps it to himself. 

Dave would read the hell out of a book about Klaus - he could read an entire series. But the likelihood that the one person he can’t get out of his head is also someone that a journalist ran into and cajoled a life story out of… Dave hadn’t even really gotten a whole life story. 

There was that night, when Klaus set loose some of his secrets like they were bullets, like they were worth nothing, or everything.

A dark night, when the deep and stormy jungle seems to surround them closer than usual, and Klaus’ mood is all of that and more, darker and deeper and stormier, and cruel and frantic and delirious and wild, and his hands are shaking so badly that he can’t light up.

“You want to hear something really fucked up, Katz?” The use of his last name is an indicator that actually he probably doesn’t - they were at first names, even starting to drop unthinking, inadvertent pet names when they were alone - but Klaus snorts the smack from between his knuckles and tells him, “I think this war, this _fucking war_, is probably the best thing that ever happened to me.” 

He laughs and laughs, the sound gaunt and sizzling, until the mortar fire picks up again and chokes him silent. Then he grins in a way Dave has never seen on him before, a rabid snarl, like his expression won’t be complete until there is blood slicking his teeth. He aims it up at the sky, where the constant smoke makes every night a starless one.

But for all that Klaus is a ‘soldier,’ he’s not very good at being combative, and it crumples out of him in seconds. He folds in on himself, clutching his shoulders, his ribs, clenching so tightly that he’s trembling, covering up his nose and mouth as he starts in on a whispered mantra, “Fuck,” repeated over and over on every inhale and exhale like he can only breath in curses, and then he presses his fingers into his eyes, with the same vibratingly forceful pressure that a moment ago he was putting to the bones of his chest and Dave is worried he is going to crush those gorgeous, haunted, perfect eyes right out of his head. 

“Hey, hey,” he says, a manta of his own. Dave’s light touch to Klaus’ elbow makes his whole torso jerk away, but he moves his hands away from his eyes. He grips the bottom half of his face instead, but his shoulders consciously drop and he’s stopped the swearing as he clearly tries to get a hold of his breathing.

“There you go,” Dave says, soothingly, even though he knows that’s nothing more than an adverb, a modifier. He can say things in a soothing way, but nothing can actively soothe what’s happening here. “It’s alright - well, it’s not, but you’re not alone. This place is hell, everyone here has been right where you are right now. You’ll pull through it.”

At first he thinks Klaus is crying, but then he realizes it’s laughter. “No,” Klaus manages between gasping chuckles, “I actually mean it. The Viet-fucking-nam War is an actual high point in my shitty goddamned life. That is such bullshit!” He swipes dirty tears off of his cheeks, and Dave realizes that it’s both. He’s heard of ‘crying from laughter,’ but it turns out that Klaus does it the other way around. Eventually he comes to learn that this is a side effect of that ‘goddamned life’ of his.

But at the time, Dave flounders, out of his depth with this unfamiliar swirl of seemingly incongruous emotions. He stammers out something about good times and family, and it makes Klaus let out a cracked peal of laughter.

“My family!” he exclaims, smile and tone forcefully bright. He grows immediately brittle and says, “I’m going to die here, in _Vietnam_, and my family will never even know. I mean they’ll know I’m dead, but they’ll figure I’m in a ditch somewhere, or someone’s basement, or it doesn't really matter where. Just another brother that disappeared, but finally the one that it makes sense to lose.” 

His knuckles go back up to his eyes again. All the snarling humor is gone, left him alone with nothing but weighty sorrow. “Ben’s all alone, and it’s my fault, again.” He breaks himself off to stifle a sob, clamps down on his quivering lower lip and turns the sound into a high, keening whine that claws up his throat. Dave wants to reach out, and his hands are ahead of him, halfway outstretched, but as much as he wants to comfort Klaus, for some reason that he can’t understand, he’s nervous to touch him.

“And this _place_. The _things_ people can do to each other.” Klaus shakes his head, and the long, desolate stare is at least familiar ground. It’s the same in every pair of eyes that Dave has seen since he got in country. But Klaus surprises him again, he’s always doing that, because when he turns them on Dave, those big eyes have something new and unreadable in them. “And that woman, I’m pretty sure she died getting me out of there, and it sucks, all of it is so fucking spectacularly horrifically awful, and I would pick it all anyway, nothing could be enough for me not to pick this, because I’m a colossally selfish fuck-up, and you are the best thing that ever happened to me.”__

_ _And Dave is no selfless saint, either, because he understands this sentiment intimately._ _

_ _

_ _He teases him for it later. Gently, because he holds those words and the person who said them so precious in his heart. It’s a week after that night, and Dave’s wheedling Klaus to share his tin of peaches, which he's pretending he’s going to store away in his rucksack. He knows Klaus will do it because he never seems to care about the rations they get, and he also knows Klaus will give him a playfully hard time over it because light bickering is something they both like to do for fun. They are clearly both younger siblings. _ _

_ _“This dessert is very important to me! Keeping it as a future snack is going to be what motivates me to stay alive out here.”_ _

_ _Dave says, “Oh, are those peaches the best thing that ever happened to you? Because I thought that was me.” He points at himself. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I remember you saying that. About me. The best thing that ever happened to you.” He’s not even through with the phrase when Klaus tosses the can over._ _

_ _His face is heated up, which is something Dave hasn’t seen on him before. Turns out that Klaus is ridiculously attractive when he’s blushing. Unsurprisingly, since he is ridiculously attractive at all times._ _

_ _“In my defense,” Klaus says throatily as he tries to find his way back to haughty banter, which seems unnecessary to Dave, who is enjoying this bashful, happily flustered Klaus, “you are at least partially to blame for that. Any normal person would have made me shut up way before I got that far.”_ _

_ _…_made_ him shut up? In the midst of what was clearly a full-blown breakdown?_ _

_ _“Like, as soon as I started talking.” Klaus chuckles, because he really is saying this thinking there’s a joke somewhere in there and not another reminder of how Klaus’ definition of ‘normal’ behavior doesn’t even come close to Dave’s definition of ‘decent.’ He takes hold of Klaus’ hand, but before he comes up with the right words, Klaus reads it all in his expression. _ _

_ _It makes his face fall, makes him look away, and either Klaus interpreted him wrong or ‘I would never _make_ you shut up and no one ever should’ is a statement that makes Klaus’ face fall, which, Dave has a whole ‘nother diatribe his face could say about that. He watches Klaus swallow compulsively a few times in profile and he doesn’t know what to do, because he certainly didn’t intend for this small, bright reprieve from the never-ending horrors of modern warfare to pivot into a sad place. He won’t let go of Klaus’ hand._ _

_ _But then Klaus turns back to him and he’s kissing Dave, kissing him ravenously, kissing him like this kindness from Dave is the first time Klaus has ever tasted it and he’s starving for more._ _

_ _To be honest, Dave can’t remember where the peaches ended up._ _

_ _

_ _It becomes another familiarity of Klaus - he’ll make casual jokes that Dave can’t find funny at all. It’s comedy born from a desperately sad life. Sometimes Dave’ll push his upset aside so they can stay in a pleasant moment, but other times, other things, he has to bring up right then so he can make sure that Klaus knows that Dave won’t ever treat him that way, and that he shouldn’t accept anyone else treating him like that, either. _ _

_ _Kissing Klaus is one of his all-time favorite pastimes, but sometimes his wild, reckless, insatiable kisses make Dave want to cry._ _

_ _

_ _The point of it all is that Klaus only ever talked about his family in roundabout ways, snippets in conversation that Dave can add up to make a wavering image of a life, but nothing substantial enough for Dave to have the information he needs to find him. He tries, he does, but the one solid thing he knows, the city Klaus grew up in, is a huge place, so all he can do is watch crowds go by and try to see if anyone looks like they are from a big, shitty family that doesn't value their treasure of a brother in the way he deserves._ _

_ _He can admit that this is not very effective, and also maybe a tad biased._ _

_ _It does turn out that Dave can look for him, though. He learns about this from his sister, after she arrives._ _

_ _It’s the entirety of his little nuclear family reunited. All of them now missing from the face of the earth. It’s weird to think about it like that, so he tries not to. He’s pretty sure he shouldn’t have to _try_, over here. Or be so irritated about the part where he didn’t know until Rachel got here that he could go and look for Klaus over in the real world. _ _

_ _Things have been getting more vibrant, lately. Dave has been getting sharper at the edges. He’s a little concerned about it, and he doesn’t think he should be able to be concerned, either, which is irritating, and it’s a frustrating, impossible cycle that prickles in the back of his mind._ _

_ _Everyone comes here, eventually, where it is soft and tender, and sadness is only a memory, but maybe Dave is broken. Maybe that’s why Klaus never comes for him._ _

_ _Because not to keep dwelling on it, but beyond the fact that Rachel says it’s the new millennia already, there was also that thing where it had sort of seemed like Klaus could talk to the dead. Is there a conclusion he’s supposed to be able to draw that isn’t either 1) Klaus was a liar or 2) what had been the all-consuming true love of Dave’s small life hadn’t been more than a momentary fling for gorgeous, confident, experienced, _alive_ Klaus? _ _

_ _Dave needs to get out of his tiny little house. He goes on walks more often._ _

_ _

_ _The trouble with the walks is that now he knows about the bend in the road that leads to literally anywhere anytime. Rachel didn’t even realize she was showing him something new when she brought him there to go meet his grandnieces. He’d been able to meet his two nephews before he’d shipped out, little babies he’d been scared to hold for fear of breaking them, and her daughter wasn’t born until after Dave had died, but now she has grown girls of her own. _ _

_ _They stop in at a birthday party, a dance recital, a snowball fight. Their ages fluctuate, scrolling backwards and forwards in time, chubby baby fat giving way to knobby knees and then back to a time before Mariah could put words together into sentences. It’s wonderful and amazing and all you have to do is turn left at the end of his street into that spot that always felt weird to him. He’s an idiot for not exploring it earlier because you can go visit anywhere you want, and he’s guiltily a little absent from Timmy’s bar mitzvah on their first trip because he’s mainly thinking about how when they come back, he’s going to turn right back around and go find Klaus._ _

_ _But then, yeah, he doesn’t really know how to find him. Dave has a well-worn list in his brain, little traits and behaviors he’s collected and filed away under the title, ‘Reasons Why He Doesn’t Need to Worry About Klaus (because clearly he can take care of himself),’ although when he’d originally drafted it back in ‘Nam, it had reached the opposite conclusion, and now it vacillates by the day._ _

_ _Things like how Klaus could fall asleep anywhere - not _well_, no one ever slept well, out there, but Klaus could plop down on the soaked jungle floor and catch an instant cat nap even with the violent rain emphatically pelting down on his head. Or how most of the newbies had to go through a phase of hemming and hawing about their small rations before their stomachs shrunk to match, but as soon as Klaus showed up he was already sharing his portions with the others. On the one hand, it showed that Klaus could take care of himself, that he clearly was a scrapper. On the other hand, _why_?_ _

_ _Now Dave tries to use these details to help fill out a picture of where Klaus might have been, before the war. Sometimes his stories had made it seem like he was from an affluent background, but then he’d crack jokes about how at least the army thought he was a good enough investment to put boots on his feet, and everyone knows rich kids didn’t have to serve._ _

_ _They were both older than the draft. Dave had volunteered because at least he’d had the chance to hold two of his sister’s babies, he’d been able to graduate high school without knowing he was immediately heading off to die in a merciless foreign war. It was just little kids they were sending off to get killed, and when Dave left, he’d already lived more life than most of them ever got. And it didn’t seem fair, to prioritize his future over theirs, when he knew that his future wasn’t particularly apple pie._ _

_ _He was never going to get married and have kids, it just wasn’t an option. It wasn’t that he wanted to die, but it did seem like his life was a more practical one to lose, in a logical, cost-benefit sort of way. In theory, when he’d signed up, before he’d actually gotten in country, he’d been comfortable with the idea of cutting short his own empty future if it meant that some 19-year-old kid could make it home to his sweetheart and live to meet grandchildren that Dave could never have._ _

_ _That’s the heroic sounding reason, anyway. There was also the bit where he had never really come out to his folks and he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but he knew he probably would have to, at some point, unless, well…_ _

_ _He didn’t really have a grasp of what his parents would think. But he figures any father would be prouder of having a dead war hero for a son than a faggot, right? So far, Dave still hasn’t been proven right because it still hasn’t come up. Hasn’t been proven wrong yet either._ _

_ _Maybe Klaus joined up for the same reasons, although he had always seemed so free - so free it made Dave nervous - about his preferences. Maybe his asshole of a rich father was the one with the problem and he’d shipped his son off to keep him quiet._ _

_ _Because that was another entry on the list - the way that Klaus could take it on the chin, how easily he would accept harsh words and rough treatment and respond with a smile. You could slap Klaus around until he had a shiner and a split lip and he’d still happily get along with you, and that’s not a hypothetical, Dave has seen it happen. ‘Subservience’ isn’t exactly the word, but it’s close enough that it makes Dave uncomfortable to think about where Klaus picked up this dubious “skill.”_ _

_ _The trouble with the name of this list is in the subtitle, then. Dave doesn’t need to worry about Klaus’ ability to keep going, he is unquestionably a survivor, but he’s never seen enough value in ‘taking care of himself’ to bother with learning how._ _

_ _

_ _His walks are as unproductive as they ever were, but instead of carving endless circles through his dreamy perfumed little neighborhood, Dave immediately turns left and spends his days exploring the city. He can’t feel the air there, or smell it, but that seems like a small blessing in some of the dank corners he ends up finding. _ _

_ _He was in the army, he knows how to make and follow a thorough search pattern, and he does. He does and he does and he does, in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s, and he must know this place better than Klaus ever has because Klaus apparently never went outside. Dave never finds him, never even spots anyone who feels like they could conceivably be a younger or older version of the man he once knew._ _

_ _Walking every inch of a city for decades gives Dave a lot of time to think. He thinks about all of those oddities that set Klaus apart as someone who didn’t quite belong. There were the hugely visible ones, like how offhandedly he would call himself ‘pansexual’ as if that was a word that existed and also not a big deal to just say out there in the open, and then the way that he had arrived, literally out of nowhere, with no training, no dog tags, no actual clothes._ _

_ _But there were small ones, too. Since Dave has apparently taken on the role of Klaus Hargreeves’ unofficial archivist, he’s amassed a readily available collection of these less noticeable quirks. And, obviously the tenses get confusing when you live in a timeless place, including the ways in which you aren’t ‘living’ and you do a lot of spectral time-traveling, but to be clear - Dave has been taking note of everything about Klaus Hargreeves from minute one. It’s a volunteer position, and it’s been filled._ _

_ _One of the earlier instances, the Beatles thing, is also one of the strongest in support of a theory that was too crazy for Dave to believe, back then. Now it makes too much sense for Dave to let himself believe._ _

_ _It had started mainly as an excuse to touch Klaus, and a pretty good one, in Dave’s opinion, at least on the scale of ridiculous ways to excuse flirting. He’s humming the song, has been for days without figuring out the reason it got stuck in his brain, when he notices Klaus’ left palm flash into his vision and it clicks. _ _

_ _Klaus looks alarmed when Dave grabs onto his hands, but he’d only been in country for about a week and he still looks alarmed about pretty much everything. “You say goodbye and I say hello,” Dave sings the lyrics out loud, waggling the appropriate hand when they come up._ _

_ _“Uh, goodbye, I guess? What is going on?” Klaus is looking at him with wide eyes, but the confusion has pivoted from concern to amusement._ _

_ _Dave keeps going for a few more lines, although it’s not like the lyrics are varied enough that one of them will clear it up for him if he hasn’t gotten it already. “You’re telling me you don’t know this song?” _ _

_ _Klaus shakes his head. “Am I supposed to?”_ _

_ _One of their three previous conversations had been about home, like it usually is with the newbies out here, and Klaus had cooed at Dave for being a sheltered midwestern boy, while also managing not to mention much more about himself than the city he was from. “They don’t play The Beatles in the big city, huh?”_ _

_ _“Oh wow, The Beatles, no, right, of course. With that famous song.” Klaus says it like a question and smiles at him, and the truth of it is that Dave doesn’t care how under a rock this hot, dumb cherry might be as long as he keeps giving Dave smiles like that. Then he sings, unrecognizably at the time, two months before the single was released, “Hey Jude, da da duh dah, take a sad song and duh duh something. Totally got it.” _ _

_ _So now it’s Dave’s turn for confused but amused. “Did you hit your head on the way over here?”_ _

_ _Klaus grins. “Repeatedly.” He says it like it’s an inside joke that he’s sharing with the open air, but then his expression shrinks serious and sad again._ _

_ _“Who’s the president?” Dave jokes. He wants to coax some more smiles out of Klaus, bring him back to the present and out of whatever sobering memory of the past makes his eyes look like that. It’s a partial success. Klaus blinks back to life and gets busy yanking at the straps on the pack they’d rustled up for him._ _

_ _“Lyndon B. Jackson? What year is it? Nixon?” Klaus tries. “What year is it?”_ _

_ _It takes Dave a minute to answer. “’68?” It sounds like a question because it is, one that can also be pronounced, ‘Don’t you know?’_ _

_ _Klaus just brushes it off. “Doesn’t help. As if I ever paid enough attention in class. Lyndon B. …” _ _

_ _“Johnson.” _ _

_ _In class?_ _

_ _“Right! That’s what I said.” _ _

_ _It’s not._ _

_ _“What I _meant_.”_ _

_ _Dave takes hold of those tattooed hands again, but now it’s to still them as he tries to get a good look into Klaus’ eyes. “Are you sure you don’t actually have a concussion?”_ _

_ _“It would explain some things, right?” Klaus says cheerfully, “but not the things you think.”_ _

_ _Dave’s not a doctor. He’s seen medics checking eyes after hits to the head, but he won’t know how to tell if something is wrong; he doesn’t know what he’s looking for in Klaus’ eyes. But he does find that they are very green, and that he would like to spend a lot more time with them._ _

_ _Which is why the theory - that Klaus seemed so out of place in ’68 because he’s from the future - is so unacceptable. ‘The future’ is just so big. It’s too sprawlingly, incomprehensibly vast for Dave to succeed in finding one very specific pair of eyes, and he really needs to see them again. He never got enough time._ _

_ _

_ _There is one place, of course, that Dave knows he can find Klaus. It’s not a place he wants to revisit. He’d hoped at least in dying that he’d seen the last of that godforsaken place._ _

_ _He stops turning left in the morning and goes to the center of town. Takes a pottery class. Only makes it to two sessions before he stops going outside entirely._ _

_ _

_ _He needs to get out of the house, he gets that. He’s frustrated that he _needs_ to do anything, over here, but he’s pretty sure that spending less time alone is something he needs to do._ _

_ _There’s always these community gatherings in the town center, whenever you want to go to one, carnivals or concerts or cookouts, and he manages to go with his family to a couple. They don’t seem worried about his turn to the reclusive, but time moves differently for everyone here, and Dave gets the sense that it’s bent around him to hide it from them. This place isn’t designed with space for worrying about your loved ones. Not in most cases.  
Dave wouldn’t mind getting a bit of the same consideration, if anyone cares._ _

_ _It’s not true, actually. Sometimes he’ll think that, that he’d like to be set free to enjoy some of the peace that everyone else here gets to have. But as soon as he thinks it, he gets hit by a wave of anxiety bigger than any of the gnawing concern he normally feels. Because there isn’t a cut clean enough that could excise the worry but leave the love in place. He doesn’t think he could feel the second without some of the first, not until - well, not until he has good reason not to worry anymore._ _

_ _The problem isn’t with the events themselves. They are always, of course, the perfect blend of winking sunshine and buzzy hubbub. They draw in a lot of people, though. It’s not that Dave minds the crowd, exactly, it’s just that he can’t stop himself from spending the whole time scanning faces. Every time he spots a mess of brown curls is a cruel prank; his brain knows better, but his heart leaps anyway and he has to watch, over and over again, as his doomed hopes come into focus as anyone, everyone, except the person he is looking for._ _

_ _It bleeds some of the fun out of the festivities._ _

_ _So he doesn’t go to too many of those._ _

_ _Powloski pulls Dave out of his little corner of suburbia, just once, and into the sprawling metropolis where he lives in a blocky, towering apartment building. It’s a terrific illustration of that adage about one man’s paradise being another man’s ‘fine for a visit but never for longer than a day.’ In some ways, it reminds him of the city he’s spent so long scouring, but it’s much cleaner, and everyone here can see and hear him, not just a handful of mangled, broken spirits schlepping along their endless, bloody paths. It makes for a nicer neighborhood, not having them clawing around, but Dave’s still not impressed. Once you’ve seen one tall building, you’ve seen them all, really._ _

_ _What he’s actually come to see is the group of vets that like to meet up and get horrendously drunk every now and then. It’s always growing, slowly but surely, and whenever someone new arrives, it’s cause for a raucous celebration. Powloski says someone new arrives nearly every meeting - maybe whenever one of them moves in, it sets off some unconscious ripple that prompts them to come together._ _

_ _This time, the gathering is for Dave. He didn’t know that, going in, or he probably wouldn’t have come, but it ends up being a good thing. Gives him a bit of cover, a starting point of ‘catching up’ chatter so when every conversation comes around to the same thing, he can almost believe himself that it’s not the whole reason he came, but just a coincidence._ _

_ _“Oh yeah, Jude,” Dave will say, calling him by his nickname because that story had definitely gotten around. “I remember him, sure. Have you seen him? Over here, or back there?”_ _

_ _Very casual. _ _

_ _The closest thing he gets to an answer turns out to be nothing. Rapp snaps his fingers a few times, scraping up a memory. “Wait, what was the kid’s actual name again?”_ _

_ _“Klaus.” Dave’s mouth is dry._ _

_ _“No, that’s not - Hargreeves! Why is that familiar?”_ _

_ _Some guy, he joined up after Dave had died, supplies, “You’re thinking of that actress,” and what does he know about it anyway, this guy’s never even _met_ Klaus. It’s completely irrational anger, and Dave gathers it up at his sternum so he can let it all go in an exhale._ _

_ _It’s what he had anticipated, that no one would know anything and Klaus would stay just as mysterious as he ever was. It’s a disappointment, but the rest of the get-together is surprisingly _nicer_ than he expected it to be. There’s none of the muddy sadness that Dave thinks would unavoidably smear the sidelines of an occasion like this if they weren’t all over here, where healing is (perhaps literally) in the air. The other key difference is that they never lose anyone. Not everyone’s here yet, but they will be, so there’s no need for mourning or missing._ _

_ _After they say their goodbyes to the group, Powloski drives the point home in a way that seems just as meticulously unscripted as Dave’s line of questioning. “Everyone gets here, and when they do, it’s a bone fide happily ever after. There’s nothing worth being sad over, if you think about it like that, right?”_ _

_ _Dave thinks about it like that, and it’s true, there isn’t much tragedy in war after all when you know that the casualties were just people arriving early to their happy ending. So there isn’t any good reason for him to be so squirrelly about going back there. Simple as that._ _

_ _

_ _It’s unsettling to be here without feeling the wet air weighing him down and clogging his skin, without needing to swap away a single mosquito. He flinches at the sound of the artillery, but he knows he doesn’t need to. _ _

_ _It’s unsettling, period. He’d always been sure there was nothing that could make him come back. Klaus continues to defy expectation._ _

_ _He knows this isn’t the argument Powloski was trying to make. In fact, it’s likely the opposite, but Dave’s house is next to a time-traveling tunnel and he hasn’t seen his boyfriend’s face in nearly half a century._ _

_ _He didn’t have a specific night in mind when he came through, just sometime nearer the end of his tour than the beginning. Not that it matters how close they were at this point. Because he knows, he _knows_, he _does_ know, that 'visiting' people this way is a one-sided interaction, watching a movie from the inside but still as powerless to effect the story as he’d be on his couch at home. The shitty little hopeful voice inside his head keeps whispering, ‘but maybe,’ and he tells it to fuck off. It doesn’t._ _

_ _Making his way through the firebase, he sees a couple faces that he saw just the other day at the meeting. Much grubbier and hollower on this side than they are over there. It’s not as sad as it could be, though, because he knows, for an absolute fact, that their faces will fill back out and they’ll all find their smiles again. _ _

_ _He’s got his own to find, so he doesn’t linger, a tether in his center pulling him to the edge of camp. Most of the guys out here, Dave included, didn’t like being outside on the nights they were lucky enough to have an inside to go into. Too many sounds up in the trees and you couldn’t see what was making them. But Klaus liked being out there, and Dave liked being with Klaus, and that - there he is, right there._ _

_ _There’s that mess of dark hair, facing out into the shadowed night, thin line of smoke threading over his shoulder and folding in with the rest of the country’s smoldering air. Dave stops so fast that he probably would have fallen over his feet if physics still meant anything to him on this side. It’s him, it is, it’s really him this time, but Dave can’t go any closer, because what if it’s not? _ _

_ _And so that’s it then, the thrilling conclusion to the decades-long story of the biggest idiot to ever die, on the hunt for one last glimpse of his lover’s face, and he settles for the back of a head because he’s too chickenshit to move._ _

_ _Klaus glances over his shoulder. “That was fast.”_ _

_ _He turns his head back around like it’s nothing. This moment has wiped Dave’s brain entirely clear and he can’t even remember how to breathe, but it’s nothing. No big deal._ _

_ _There’s some sort of autopilot that goes with the self-destruct, at least, because somehow he says, “It felt like a long time.”_ _

_ _Klaus laughs, and holy hell he’s missed listening to that, to the myriad of Klaus’ beautiful variations on the theme. He looks at Dave again, hiding a smile behind his raised shoulder like it’s a fan. “You can think of nothing but me while I’m away,” he says and lazily lifts his wrist to his forehead, playing like he’s a besotted Regency heroine, because it’s a joke, what he’s saying, but Dave is nodding helplessly anyway. Dave doesn’t have to _act_ besotted._ _

_ _“People have said I have an addictive personality, but I don’t think that’s what they meant,” Klaus says. Realizing that Dave is rooted to the spot, he turns to fully face him. “Think I like this new interpretation better.”_ _

_ _So now Klaus is standing there, right there, looking at Dave, and smiling at him, and _right there_. And talking to him, because it was all true, it always has been - Klaus is magic and he can see the dead and he can see Dave and frankly, Vietnam doesn’t seem like such a bad place to spend his forever when he doesn’t have to worry about dying anymore and when Klaus is right there and smiling at him like that because Dave can make him smile like that. _ _

_ _“You’re a miracle,” Dave says. He doesn’t intend to, but it’s true._ _

_ _“Don’t think anyone’s said _that_ before.”_ _

_ _“You’re an angel,” he says, and it’s almost a question. _ _

_ _There’s a crease in Klaus’ brow as he takes a drag. “That one’s definitely new.”_ _

_ _But maybe Dave’s not wrong. The way Klaus arrived, in a burst of radiant light; the way Klaus disappeared from the unit just as abruptly, never to be seen again on either continent. The way he was never able to say much about where he’d come from, but how it was clearly not quite the same world as the rest of them. He was always humming songs no one had ever heard, using slang no one understood, and not understanding theirs. He had that weird connection with death, the way he had survived that explosion, and how he would sometimes pass messages along from the men they had lost. To any outsider who asked, the guys would scoff and say that Jude was full of bullshit, but whenever he had something to say, they would always gather in close and listen carefully._ _

_ _Maybe he is like Dave’s saying, a softhearted angel, came to their unit for a short time to ameliorate the horrors around them. Maybe that’s why Dave doesn’t fit quite right over on his side, because the scales have to balance out, and he was blessed with his miracle ahead of time. _ _

_ _Maybe when he’s back where he belongs and feeling particularly peeved about his strange disconnect, he’ll wrap himself up in this theory like it’s a blanket and let it keep him warm for as long as he can let himself believe in it, because he knows it’s not true. It’s a flight of fancy brought on by the heady rush of seeing this gorgeous creature after too long apart._ _

_ _Klaus is all of these inexplicable, magical, wondrous things, but he’s also probably the most human person Dave has ever met, a contradictory mess of devastating empathy constantly bleeding through barbed defensiveness, confident in his fears and failures, an all-too-willing servant to his vices. Not acknowledging his faults is a disservice; it’s like how, even out here, coated in sweat and grime, lit against the backdrop of senseless violence, under the haze and glare of weaponry, his beauty shines so bright. No list of shortcomings can make Klaus a bad person, because in the face of those shortcomings, the way he strives towards good is itself the proof that he is an exceptionally good person._ _

_ _“I want to know everything about you,” Dave says, because he does, in that obsessive, romantic way, but also because with Klaus being able to talk to him, he can finally get usable information to find him, outside of this war zone. “You never told me enough.”_ _

_ _“It’s usually the opposite of that. People beg me to stop talking.”_ _

_ _Dave shakes his head and holds himself back from tackling that one. Following up on detours like that is at least 50% of the reason why he knows so few actual facts about Klaus’ past. “I always want to listen you to talk. I want you to tell me everything.”_ _

_ _The good humor goes out of Klaus like a popped balloon. “Guess it had to get to this at some point,” he says to the ground. He’s wry as he asks Dave, “So, what? You want to hear about my miserable prick of a father? How none of us could ever do anything good enough to win his approval, but he always seemed to hold a special spot in his rotting husk of a heart for despising me?” _ _

_ _It’s not the first time Dave has heard about this, but it’s always so baffling. “How could he?” He’s know it’s not a question that will get an actual answer, and it doesn’t really deserve one, but he can’t leave it unsaid. _ _

_ _Klaus gestures, first at his chest and then sweeping his hands wide and down to include his whole self. “Pick a reason,” he snorts. “I could give you a list of my many failings, but I always find it’s more fun for people to discover them on their own - I’m the world’s shittiest Jumble.” He grins, but it’s tight and his eyes are hard, an expression of combativeness being locked down. _ _

_ _Dave knows enough to understand that the flare of anger isn’t actually directed at him, and Klaus knows that Dave knows, so the apology is unspoken and forgiven at the same time._ _

_ _Klaus scratches a grubby hand through his hair. “You know what else is fun, actually, is listening to you test drive those new compliments; maybe we could go back to doing that.” He offers a small, but real, smile, and then his gaze snags. His mouth keeps running, but the stream of words flows unevenly as he watches a VC ghost shamble past them. “My gut reaction is that they might be a bit too worshipful for everyday use, but my mind is open.”_ _

_ _The ghost can’t move too fast with one of his legs warped backward the way it is, and he’s still in shock, whispering some kind of unending mantra under his breath, punctuated by hissing moans when he jostles his fatal injury. And he’s young. So young, like so many of the GIs. Dave doesn’t know why it is that some spirits stay wandering around over here, but the ones he’s seen always seem to be clutching tight to the trauma of a violent death. When they can let go, he thinks, they’ll find their way over, but that’s a particularly cruel irony._ _

_ _“I’m willing to be persuaded,” Klaus is saying in that distracted way, “or review any other candidates you might have lined up.”_ _

_ _As the kid slips into the darkness again, he has Dave’s well-wishes at his back, hoping that he’ll find his way soon._ _

_ _But then he realizes that Klaus has stopped talking, and realizes that this is likely because Dave has also stopped talking, and Dave rips his eyes away from the ghost’s path to meet Klaus’ narrowed ones. Dave’s response is stalled while he tries remember what they were talking about, and that’s another hit of irony, a role reversal for a conversation with Klaus. _ _

_ _It’s not too hard to get back to, because it is unfortunately familiar ground. Klaus hates his dad, and Klaus hates himself. The painful swell in his chest is also familiar, so although he means to be on a fact-finding mission, and although it was intended as a joke, Dave does what Klaus asked of him._ _

_ _He lets loose. “You’re breathtaking. Astonishing. I can’t stop thinking about you and I never want to. I don’t know how I got so lucky. Being loved by you is life-changing.”_ _

_ _Klaus’ face is a shade somewhere beyond red. He’s blinking and his breath is hitching and, yeah, Dave can understand that this might be a lot from Klaus’ perspective. He’s not entirely sure what exact point in their relationship he’s dropped in on, although it doesn’t really matter; Klaus had never seemed fully at ease with hearing bald-faced declarations of love out loud like this._ _

_ _“Holy _christ_, Dave,” he stammers, “you can’t just say stuff like that.” He presses a hand to his chest, like his heart is literally effected. He chokes out a giggling chuckle, an effort to push his emotions back out to a comfortable distance, one where he can laugh at them. “Gotta warn a guy before you start in with that kind of dirty talk.”_ _

_ _“Nothing dirty about it, darlin'. Just the truth,” Dave says plainly._ _

_ _“Filthy,” Klaus shudders. “You’ve got to stop it, Katz, you’re going to ruin me.” _ _

_ _“Not possible. You’re - ” strong, and resilient, and brave, and Dave doesn’t think there are enough adjectives in the English language to capture all of the amazing qualities of Klaus - “incredible.”_ _

_ _“Stop. Talking.” Klaus takes a step towards him, his breathing heavy, his eyes sharp and searching, scared but open._ _

_ _Scared, but open. That’s really Klaus’ whole thing, isn’t it? It’s a potent combination, poignant in a way Dave can’t even begin to describe. So for now, he says, “I’m in love with you. I never got to say it enough. I love you.”_ _

_ _“If you don’t stop talking, I _will_ make you.” But the edge in his voice isn’t distress anymore. Playfulness gleams in his eyes._ _

_ _“You can try,” Dave shoots back, forgetting._ _

_ _Klaus says, “That a challenge, soldier?” and he’s moving forward before Dave has time to fully regret his word choice and he reaches up to the back of Dave’s neck to pull him in for a kiss. Then it’s not playfulness making his eyes shine, because he can _try_, but he can’t, actually._ _

_ _He barely brushes up against the edge of where Dave isn’t and he knows. He yanks his hand away so hard and fast that it sends him back a few steps. He lightly rubs his fingertips together as he stares down at them._ _

_ _Dave hadn’t been purposefully hiding the part where he was a ghost, because it was possible Klaus knew and could tell on sight, and Dave hadn’t actively avoided asking if he knew, except that maybe he had. It isn’t unreasonable, to be a little nervous to bring up your death to a loved one. It’s not very brave, either, and the cost for the shortcut is paid by the people who find out the hard way. _ _

_ _Although, Klaus is calmer than expected. “No,” he says quietly, sounding more disappointed than anything else. When he looks at Dave, he’s wearing almost the same face as when they met, like he’s hopelessly lost. “But you were - I just - how did - ” He reaches out a trembling hand, but pauses halfway there, and then snaps it back, curls his fingers in, like he’s afraid to touch him. And that’s understandable, but it hurts._ _

_ _He says, “No,” again, emphatic and stern this time, like if his tone is authoritative enough, it can enact the change he wants. Then his lip quivers, and the rest of him falls apart. _ _

_ _It’s his only word, “No no no no,” over and over, blending together into one continuous whine, sliding higher the more his body crumples. He wipes away at his eyes, catching the tears welling there, painting his face with them as his hands move back, clawing through his hair until he’s bunched it up in fistfuls behind his ears, his arms a cage pressing close around his head._ _

_ _Klaus can see ghosts, but that doesn’t mean he necessarily knows that time-traveling ghosts are a thing that exist. “Oh, shit,” Dave curses. “Hey, no, sorry, it’s not what you think. I really fucked this up, it’s not what you think.”_ _

_ _He doesn’t particularly expect this to get through; he’s seen Klaus shatter before and he gets pretty senseless to the world around him while he pulls himself back together. It lands with an unexpected impact._ _

_ _Klaus’ fists shoot down to his sides and his entire torso goes ramrod stiff, which isn’t usually a Klaus adjective, and he yells at him, “Oh, right, I’m just confused, like this exact thing hasn’t happened before, exactly like this!” He cuts himself off, and freezes, like his whole self has been put on pause for a moment, which in Dave’s experience isn’t a great sign. _ _

_ _He clicks back into motion, saying, “Yeah. No. Actually, yeah.” Not a great sign. “Yeah, no, this isn’t happening, actually, that’d be too - it’s not.” He keeps making little facial expressions that look like he’s still talking things out, but without sound, and that might be because Klaus doesn’t seem to be breathing anymore. He’s on a constant inhale, his chest and neck straining up and up like he’s going to tear himself apart and float away by force of will._ _

_ _It’s instinctual, thoughtless, stupid habit that makes Dave reach out to soothe him. He puts his hand right through Klaus’ shoulder. It does at least shock Klaus into breathing again._ _

_ _He reels back, throws his tattooed palms up as if in surrender, and shouts, “Fuck!”_ _

_ _It’s the final confirmation Klaus never wanted, and he concaves. _ _

_ _Dave has gotten everything royally ass-backwards. He doesn’t know how to fix this, doesn’t know the way to explain that he isn’t actually dead yet but in a few months that will change, and doesn’t think telling him that is likely to make things better, anyway. He’s responsible for the keening sounds Klaus is making, and his chest hurts worse than it did when it had a hole blown through it. He’d suspected (but hadn’t allowed himself to fully hope) that Klaus might be able to see him, but he had _known_ that seeing the dead was a torment for him. Of course it wouldn’t be any different seeing Dave this way - it would be worse._ _

_ _He’s caught in a panic, unable to decide if it’s better for him to stick around and try to explain anyway or if he should just snap back home and out of Klaus’ life. Then Dave shows up._ _

_ _The living Dave, the Dave that belongs here, the Dave that belongs with Klaus. He didn’t know it was possible to be this grateful for yourself, and this envious._ _

_ _“Hey, sorry, I was - ” he says as he walks up to them, although his past self is not aware that Klaus is not alone. He moves right through Dave’s body - his ghost body - and in every possible way, it’s a disturbing sensation._ _

_ _For his part, Klaus looks like his brain is about to explode as he stares at his two boyfriends. Not that it had ever particularly bothered Dave, obviously, but this whole experience is doing a lot to put Klaus’ odd behavior into crystal clear perspective. _ _

_ _He really screwed this up._ _

_ _Alive Dave is doing all of the soothing touches that Dead Dave wishes he were able to do. Klaus eventually wrests his horrified focus away from Dead Dave, who is dimly feeling like calling himself by this new moniker might be doing his future self some damage. But Future Dave is still Dead Dave, so it’s not really a top priority. _ _

_ _Klaus grabs on to the hand he can actually hold and presses Dave’s fingers to his lips. Even when he breaks the kiss, he still clings tightly to Dave’s hand. He won’t let go. He tucks their intertwined hands below his chin, close to his heart, like it’s the only thing keeping him upright, like somehow it’s the pillar supporting his entire slight frame._ _

_ _“It’s true what they say - the weed really is stronger out here.” Klaus offers the explanation with a shrug and a smile, and Dave shakes his head fondly and accepts it. Just accepts Klaus shrugging off his own very real and very visible suffering, accepts it like it’s normal, just ‘Klaus being Klaus,’ not a big deal, a joke if you just look at it like it’s funny. Alive Dave goes with it._ _

_ _At least he doesn’t say ‘you look like you saw a ghost,’ but his comment isn’t much better. “Looks like a bummer.”_ _

_ _“Awful,” Klaus whispers, and he’s staring at Dave - Dead Dave - as he says it._ _

_ _Dave doesn’t even remember this night. He wants to, to be able to recall this and reframe things somehow. Come to a fresh understanding of some part of their shared past, so there can be something new that they share that isn’t the awful way Klaus is staring at him._ _

_ _He’s pretty pissed with himself. Both living and dead. Whichever way you slice it, Dave is responsible for a lot of things going terribly wrong tonight. He never should have come. Which means this is his last chance, the last time he’ll see him, and he’s gripped by a sudden, frenzied panic trying to find the right words to say, to impart something that can fix this, that can help Klaus in a few month's time, when this dumb, obliviously lucky Alive Dave turns into something awful that appears to cause Klaus physical pain to look at._ _

_ _Dumbass Dave slings his arm across Klaus’ shoulders like it’s nothing to him and says maybe they should head inside. The two of them turn to go._ _

_ _“Klaus. Klaus, wait, hold on,” Dave says, because this can’t be it, this can’t be how it ends with them. This can’t be it, it can’t be. “Klaus, please, Klaus!”_ _

_ _If looks could kill, Dave would be twice as dead as he is already. The fucking _look_ Klaus gives him. _ _

_ _With deadly conviction, soft and strong, Klaus says, “Leave me alone.” _ _

_ _Soft and strong. Scared but open. Eminently fallible, unconditionally perfection. Dave loves him more than he can even understand, and now he’s hurt him in ways he can’t fully understand, either. Some of love’s paradoxes are infinitely more beautiful than others._ _

_ _“Not you,” Klaus says, nuzzling into the shoulder of Fucking Blissfully Ignorant Lucky Bastard Dave._ _

_ _Dead Dave lets them have their time. They didn’t have enough of it. He fizzes out, leaves his world behind. “Okay,” he says._ _

_ _

_ _So he makes his eggs in the morning, digs in his garden in the afternoon, drinks when the sky gets dark. One thing he can’t do is cry, and that’s not some macho bullshit. He really can’t cry. His brain’ll bring up Klaus’ murderous look and then dart away before he gets the chance to sort any of his feelings out. Whoever designed this place really is not getting the best review from Dave._ _

_ _He’s just got to work harder. Put in any work at all, really; he’d carried on as though his obsession was healthy simply because he’d been able to fall into it so deeply. Over here, where everything from the grass growing to the air itself filters out anything wrong or difficult, purifies and polishes until there is only simple positivity. But he knows better - he always had known. Something about Dave causes a fault in the system._ _

_ _Something. Not some_one_. It’s a _mystery_, of course. His magic boyfriend with a connection to the dead and who seemed pretty pissed with him the last time they saw each other has nothing to do with any of it. _ _

_ _He doesn’t. He wouldn’t. Genuinely. Dave doesn’t believe that Klaus is capable of that kind of viciousness. He likes to pretend he’s aloof and unaffected like a flashy supervillain in a comic book, but he’s a real bleeding heart. As angry as he may have been with Dave, he would never do something to ruin Dave’s afterlife, forever, to hurt Dave for the rest of eternity._ _

_ _'Not on purpose,' adds a bitter, cynical voice in his head. Which he shouldn’t even be able to have over here! That is added by the same impossible voice._ _

_ _It doesn’t matter. The fact of it is that everyone gets here eventually. It’s the most basic tenant of this place, the first bit of knowledge that you gain when you arrive. It’s an immutable, unchangeable, universal constant. Either Klaus will find him eventually, or he won’t want to, and either way, there’s nothing Dave can do about any of it. Everyone dies._ _

_ _It’s just a matter of time, which he has plenty of. It’s just waiting, believing that Klaus still loves him. Mostly, that’s not hard to do. He can replay with perfect clarity everything about that moment, the hard inflection of, “Leave me alone.” But he shouldn’t. So. Events. Spending time with other people, who he doesn’t need to wait on. Getting out of the house, but not by himself, not turning left._ _

_ _

_ _He can go left if he’s got a chaperone, he decides. Rachel wants to go for a visit with him, to relive time spent with her grandkids, a perfect autumn afternoon spent splashing about in leaf piles. It does sound like a beautiful memory to slip into, and it’s the early 2000s, so it’s pretty unlikely that he’ll run into any devilishly handsome mediums._ _

_ _Also, the 2000s. It’s crazy to think about. It’s not as though he didn’t think the world was going to make it this long, except maybe, some of those nights in country, that’s exactly what he thought. It doesn’t look that different, the people and the trees and all that. Different haircuts, new styles, but it’s still all just people, not robots or flying cars or anything._ _

_ _He teases Rachel about her haircut. He always sees her the way he remembers her, in her early thirties, but at the time they visit, she has short cropped grey hair, an old lady hairstyle. She - the she from then, the grandma version of she - is raking, or coming in and out the house with cookies and cider, just generally busying herself so that she can keep an eye on the kids and the imaginary battle they are carrying out. Dave can understand why she wanted to come back to this. Even without being able to feel the air around them, some level of his brain is telling him that deep in his bones or his soul or his somehow, he can smell nearby chimney smoke and feel the promise of colder days soon to come in the bite of the occasional wind._ _

_ _She has a lot more memories than he does, and he wonders if she still holds onto that one summer week, when Dave was 9 or 10, and one of the neighborhood kids had cousins in town and they all got along, the whole lot of them, for one magical week. They’d spent days out at the creek together until something about their truce snapped and it was back to petty kid squabbling, but while it had been good, damn it had been great. His memories of it are all golden._ _

_ _It’s really incredible, that they can do this. That they can share this. Bringing Rachel or someone back to that moment, sharing not only the facts of it, but the truth of how precious that moment is to you - it’s a beautiful thing._ _

_ _She nudges him. “What are you thinking about?” _ _

_ _“Memories. You must have so many of them.” He wonders if that’s as overwhelming as it seems. With only half of what she has, he already feels like he’s got too many to handle._ _

_ _“Dave,” Rachel starts, right as the kids break into a shouting match._ _

_ _“He got you!”_ _

_ _“No, he didn’t, I jumped away,” Michelle corrects her younger sister, in a tone of voice that says this imaginary tactic should be obvious. “He didn’t get me.”_ _

_ _“You can’t just always do that all the time, it’s not as fun,” Mariah whines. _ _

_ _The Rachel who was actually there with them intervenes, pointing at the far side of the yard and exclaiming, “There’s more of those bad guys over there, look!”_ _

_ _She’s an expert bubbe; the girls rush over, shrieking about how, “They’ve got four! Come on, we’ve got to save him!” They crash into Rachel’s piles and send leaves fluttering all over the lawn again. She rests her chin on the rake and watches them fondly, the yard work entirely devised for their entertainment._ _

_ _As they run past again, Dave notices. “Are they wearing ties?”_ _

_ _“Old ones. Their father’s.” One has pineapples and the other one is rainbow striped. “They’re playing superheroes.”_ _

_ _“Capes go out of fashion in the future?”_ _

_ _“I don’t think capes were ever really ‘in fashion,’” Rachel teases. “There were these superhero kids, not too much older than the girls. They were always popping up in the news, stopping heists, always very dramatic crimes, in their school-kid uniforms. It was a big deal at the time. The girls were obsessed.”_ _

_ _“You mean, real superheroes? Not just in the movies? And they were kids?” His mouth is hanging open a little but he can’t help it. He’d just been thinking that the new millennia didn’t even look that different, but evidently if he picked up a newspaper, there’d be a couple of places to spot the difference._ _

_ _“The world got weird,” she says with a laugh._ _

_ _The last time he was on this side, his boyfriend talked to both an alive and a dead version of himself, and that had been 1968. “Maybe the world was already weird,” Dave says. Apparently, time-traveling ghosts have been a thing as long as there have been dead people - the world has always been weird. _ _

_ _Dave has not been doing ‘being a ghost’ to its full potential. He should go back and see the dinosaurs, or visit the far-flung future. Doesn’t even have to go too far in the future to see fantastical things; he’s technically in Rachel’s _past_, and he could go see super-powered children fight bank robbers or something. _ _

_ _“I can’t imagine what it was like,” she says haltingly._ _

_ _He thinks she’s still talking about superheroes until he looks at her face. Ah. It had to come up eventually, he supposes._ _

_ _“I thought about it, a lot. About you.” _ _

_ _The war. _ _

_ _Now that she’s got going, her words flow steady and serene. Dave can’t look up from his hands. “I would think a lot about how scared you must have been, how awful to be there in such a terrible place, with such frightening people trying to kill you every which way. How alone you must have felt out there when you died. It wasn’t until much later on in life that I realized how terrible it must have been not just to be fighting for your life, but to take theirs, too. I couldn’t decide which one would have been worse.”_ _

_ _Dave could never decide, either. If she’s looking for an easy, clear-cut answer about the nature of humanity in a war zone, well, that’s probably a malformed question, with a faulty expectation for answer. She’s definitely got the wrong guy. Having fought in a war does not mean Dave understands war._ _

_ _“But now, after coming over to our side of things - I’m not saying it wasn’t bad, and that what happens before doesn’t matter, but, it just changes your perspective on things. Oh, I’m saying this all wrong.” She worries at her lower lip, a nervous habit Dave has never seen on her before. Must have picked it up in 40-odd years since he died. “If only there was a - not that there would be likely anything quite like a support group to exist over here, but maybe if there was someone you could talk to - ”_ _

_ _“No, there is. They’ve actually said pretty similar things about it.” Like Powloski, back before ‘leave me alone.’ “It’s not a support group, exactly, but a group, of people from there.”_ _

_ _The fact that she’s bringing this up, that whatever unrest he’s been feeling hasn’t been hidden from his family as successfully as he thought - it makes him feel like an infection, a pollutant in everyone else’s happily literally ever after. Ruining someone’s forever, especially a someone you care about, it’s an uncomfortable feeling to sit in, to say the least. _ _

_ _It shouldn’t work that way. It shouldn’t be possible for him to do this to her. It violates the entire premise of this place, rule one, the certain knowledge implanted in your consciousness as soon as you arrive. Over here, for all of eternity, things are soft and kind and nothing hurts. That’s how it should be._ _

_ _There’s no loss in death when death is a gift. Life is the tragedy, on this side, but it’s a temporary one. These are the truths of the universe. Everyone gets here eventually._ _

_ _“Some of the people,” Dave says._ _

_ _“It’s not about the war, then,” says Rachel. He looks away from the girls racing across the yard and arranges what he intends to be an innocent, confused face. “I am so much older and wiser than you will ever be, you can’t pull one over on me,” she teases, but then she softens and suddenly Dave can feel those extra years, sees her both as the big sister he’s always known and as a perceptive older woman sanded smooth by decades of time and pain. “This is about a person.”_ _

_ _“Yeah,” he sighs out, and although he would have thought it would be more violently sad to finally put voice to it, it’s actually rather soothing. It flows gently like a creek of cool, clear water._ _

_ _“She must have been very special.”_ _

_ _Dave takes a deep breath. “He was.” He hears Rachel say, “Oh,” as if from a distance while he watches the autumn leaves dance in the wind like flames. “We soldiered together.”_ _

_ _“And he hasn’t made it over yet,” Rachel fills in. _ _

_ _Now the hurt cuts through a little sharper. He doesn’t know what he can say. He shrugs._ _

_ _“It’s not a bad thing,” Rachel says, “that he’s living a long life. He’ll get here eventually, Dave.”_ _

_ _“I know,” he says, like he means it, like he doesn’t tell himself this every damn day and like the unease always gnawing at him isn’t a flaw that undermines the whole system. Everyone gets here eventually, and here there is no pain. _ _

_ _And yet. He is intimately aware that there is at least one exception to that second rule. _ _

_ _He stays quiet, and she squeezes his hand, and they watch the girls play._ _

_ _“Wait,” he says. “Did you imply that there are actual, costumed child superheroes, but then that somehow stopped being a big deal?”_ _

_ _The world did get weird._ _

_ _

_ _If Dave had set out that morning with the intention of coming out to his sister, he would have gotten much too nervous to actually do it. He would have spent ages endlessly revising his plan, and then he would have chickened out. It would have been easy to let the pronouns slide, so easy, the easiest possible option, because all it took was staying quiet, which he has done for his whole life and then some._ _

_ _But he couldn’t, because staying quiet about Klaus feels like disrespecting his memory, which is odd, given that he’d been the only one involved in the conversation who, presumably, is still alive. Dave just can’t pretend that Klaus is anything besides himself, and he doesn’t want to. Nothing about Klaus and what they shared needs to be secretive or shameful._ _

_ _That’s one of the things he loves so much about Klaus, how he is just so much himself, brave and confident in a way that makes Dave want to be brave, too. He had gone off to war thinking that there was nothing to be gained from being truthful about who he was, that he was finding a faster end to a life that was destined to only ever be empty. _ _

_ _Klaus had shown him that it wasn’t a defect. Klaus had never carried his capacity to love as a burden. It wasn’t something that ever could make him unhappy._ _

_ _Klaus made Dave happy. Klaus made Dave believe that happiness was a thing he could have._ _

_ _In the worst place in the world, in his last year alive, Dave had started to think that he could have a full life. Klaus had shown him, in a million precious lessons, that with the right person loving you, it is so easy to be yourself and be happy, and that happiness is worth more than hiding._ _

_ _

_ _There is something wrong, then, about being sunk in sadness because of Klaus. It’s incompatible. However ‘Leave Me Alone’ Klaus might feel, ‘Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’ Klaus wouldn’t want this for Dave._ _

_ _He has a whole eternity stretching out before him, but it doesn’t need to feel so long. An everlasting future and nearly as much past, all full of new things to learn, like, for instance, superhero kids. He won’t be able to beat Lewis at his reading goal, but he can at least join him. He’s got the time. He re-reads some of his favorites first: C. S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Oscar Wilde. _ _

_ _He reads about the war. It turns out that the official answer to how it ended is, ‘we won,’ and that the generally accepted answer is, ‘we just eventually gave up and everyone agrees that getting into it was a terrible mistake.’ _ _

_ _He doesn’t think about how that could be a metaphor for his own time in Vietnam, specifically that last time._ _

_ _Lewis and Mrs. Hughes team up to give him modern book recommendations, and they’re thinking if they can find a couple more readers they should start a book club. Dave makes a peach pie for a family picnic in the park and it’s so good he decides that baking is going to be his new, healthier hobby. Trading in endless walks for eating sweets is the kind of healthy that matters. _ _

_ _He helps his mom bake a whole mess of rugelach for a town event; he’s working on coming to more of these. This one reminds him of a state fair, with community contests for best desserts, local bands performing, and carnival rides staged all around the square. It’s packed so full of people that Dave mostly stays hovering around the pastries table at the edge of things. He hasn’t figured out yet why the crush of bodies pressing in all around him brings on such difficult memories. Maybe the next book he reads should be about psychology._ _

_ _Rachel eventually is able to cajole him into venturing into the fray a bit, to take a turn on the ferris wheel. It’s true, it was always his favorite part of the fair when they were kids, and what could be more of a safe distance from the crowd than 50 feet above the ground? The festive spirit and jangling chords of the rhythm and blues band can still reach him up here; it’s the perfect spot to soak up the sensation of socialization without being smothered by it._ _

_ _He picks out messy haired brunettes on each revolution and watches until it becomes clear that they aren’t who he is looking for, and then he keeps watching as they throw darts or get an ice cream cone, watches to see them spark alight in joy until he can genuinely feel glad that they are here and they are happy. He’s training himself to quit holding an irrational grudge against innocent, familiar strangers. A new idea, but he thinks it’s working. _ _

_ _At the crest again, he spots another one at the far end of the square, darting past people queued up for grilled sweet corn. The guy is moving quickly, as though with purpose, but not stopping at any of the booths or going in a straight direction. His loose, gangly gait also reminds Dave a lot of Klaus, and the longer it takes to get a clear glimpse the guy’s face, the higher his heart crawls up his throat, against all advice from his brain. _ _

_ _This one might tap him out on ‘training’ for the day. It’s going to take a lot of work, more work than Dave wants to admit, to forgive this one for the unfair crime of being not the person he wants them to be._ _

_ _And for taking so long about it - the wheel has spun down low enough that Dave’s about to lose sight of him when he hops up on a curb and casts his searching gaze fully in Dave’s direction. _ _

_ _It doesn’t make any sense that he can hear Klaus shout, “Dave!” because of all the distance it has to travel. _ _

_ _Then Klaus is leaping off the curb and shoving his way through the crowd to get to him and Dave has to just sit there as the wheel lowers and this man he loves slips out of sight, drowned in all the bodies between them._ _

_ _His brain kicks back to life when he’s a few carts above the very bottom. His hands shake as he unbuckles the safety belt that doesn’t need to be there anyway, everyone is all already dead, and he tumbles out onto soft clover and starts running. _ _

_ _He makes it all the way to the corn on the cob stand. It doesn’t make sense that he missed him, how could he have missed him? But he must have missed him. Dave spins on his heel, heads back through the crowd, pointedly moving slower, less franticly, looking closely at every face, although, again, there is no way he could have gone past without recognizing him. _ _

_ _He makes it all the way to the Ferris wheel. There’s no way he could have missed him. For a while, he just stays standing frozen nearby, like a child who lost their mother in the grocery store. If he just waits here, Klaus’ll come and find him. _ _

_ _Dave walks the square, over and over, different routes, skirting the edge of the festivities, peeking into every tent, spiraling his way from the center and out, circling back in. Shadows are casting longer in the warm, fading light when a hand grasps his elbow and once again he hears his name. _ _

_ _“Dave.”_ _

_ _It’s Rachel. _ _

_ _“You look like a man on a mission. What are you up to? It’s been ages.” _ _

_ _His eyes have been roving the crowd so long that it takes effort to focus on someone close. “Rachel, hi. Sorry. I didn’t mean to make anyone nervous.”_ _

_ _She looks at him funny, because of course nobody here does ‘nervous’ anymore. Nobody except for him. “I had been hoping you’d found someone to enjoy the day with.”_ _

_ _“I didn’t find anyone,” Dave says. _ _

_ _“That’s too bad. Your rugelach was a hit, though; there’s only a few left and those are the ones dad hid away for himself.” She keeps going, chatting about cookies and recipes and the square is emptying out, and the twinkling string lights have come to life in front of the violet sky, and Klaus was here, he had been right here and Dave had missed him. He misses him. But he had been here. And now he’s not._ _

_ _He grabs the hair at the base of his neck for something to hang on to because he can feel the spinning of the earth under his feet. Although of course he isn’t really on the earth._ _

_ _Maybe this is hell._ _

_ _“I’m going to stay here for a bit,” he says, and he can’t blame her for being taken aback. He doesn’t know what she was saying but he’d cut her off right in the middle of some story. He abruptly walks away and settles onto a park bench. She’s got her perceptive face on, the closest expression to concerned that she has these days. “I just - I’m going to sit, for a bit. It was a full day, you know.”_ _

_ _“Sure,” Rachel says. She says something more about seeing him soon and maybe more things but he just nods and makes affirming noises until she goes away._ _

_ _The sunlight goes away next, and then the rest of straggling crowd, and then the carnival rides and games, all of it somehow fades away without him noticing it. He’s only got eyes for one thing, one perfect face, but Klaus doesn’t come back and Dave is left senseless._ _

_ _Klaus is here. He’s over on this side, anyway. Klaus knows where Dave is and how to find him, but he simply doesn’t want to. Dave spent so much time thinking that somehow he was special, that he’s the one exception to the rule, because he’d rather imagine some kind of twisted, breakable system than accept that Klaus just doesn’t want to see him. That ‘leave me alone’ truly is the end._ _

_ _Maybe that’s proof enough that Dave isn’t in the place he thought he was. If the afterlife has a filing system for people based on their goodness of heart, Dave’s too selfish to score high points. Or maybe he’s being extraordinarily dramatic, because Klaus was his first love, and Klaus no longer loves him, and Dave died too young to learn how to handle heartbreak._ _

_ _Enough is enough with this, he tells himself. He’s gone through this, over and over again, thinking that this time he could fix it, or this time he could move past it. Moving on is the only thing he can do, now; it’s no longer a question of waiting for Klaus to get here. He’s here already, and just not interested. The romantic reunion where they fall into each other’s arms again is not a mutual desire. He’s got to be done with this. _ _

_ _He tilts his head back and says it up to the softly clouding sky. Maybe if he says it out loud, he’ll finally be able to listen. “Enough is enough.”_ _

_ _It’s dark and silent out here. It’s time to go home._ _

_ _

_ _He loves his sister, he truly does, but it is much too early the very next morning when she comes knocking on his door. It’s only been a handful of hours since he climbed into bed and thought very hard about falling asleep, and feels like only a few minutes since he actually managed to do it. She’s no doubt got some visit planned out, on the other side or theirs, to see something breathtaking and beautiful and distracting. It’s a kind instinct, and Dave appreciates the thought, but time is so entirely meaningless over here that he is absolutely positive that whatever it is really can wait._ _

_ _The quick raps come again, quieter this time. If he really does mean it, about moving on, now is the time to prove it. Step one of moving on is getting up out of bed and doing whatever activity Rachel has planned._ _

_ _It’s not Rachel who is standing on Dave’s porch, looking off down the street like he isn’t quite sure he’s got the right house._ _

_ _Like you do when what you want most in the world suddenly arrives after you’ve waited so so long, Dave eloquently says, “Holy shit.” It makes Klaus smile like you wouldn’t believe. _ _

_ _“Yeah,” Klaus laughs._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sooo happy to finally be posting this!! I've been working on it forever and it turned out a bit l o n g.
> 
> Thanks so much to [@toomuchsky](http://www.toomuchsky.tumblr.com/)@toomuchsky and [@intricatecakes](http://www.intricatecakes.tumblr.com/) and other tumblr buds for being so supportive as I slogged away at this thing for months. You can come be friends with me on tumblr, too! I'm [@hermitreunited](http://www.hermitreunited.tumblr.com/) and I adore shouting about this show and this ship <3


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Is this about some guy or The Guy?”  
“Rachel!” He’s scandalized by the very idea that there could be just some other random guy that would light up his heart like this.  
“Oh my.” Rachel draws the vowels out long. “Oh my gosh, look at you! You’re so smitten, it’s adorable!”  
Kneeling down next to him in the strawberry patch, she takes his hands and beams at him. “I have to meet him.”
> 
> (I added some tags for this chapter, you might want to check if you have triggers around mental health issues)

It turns out, Klaus does not want Dave to leave him alone. Klaus was not staying away by choice. All of Dave’s insecure worries are proven to be unfounded. Klaus loves him, it is clear.

“I couldn’t find you, and it was the end of the world,” Klaus tells him by way of explanation, later. These are two distinct, unconnected and not euphemistic facts, apparently, but Klaus languidly waves concerns away with the hand that isn’t tucked under Dave. “_Near_ Apocalypse. No big. If you think about it, that could be happening every day and you might not even know.” 

“This is meant to be comforting, what you’re saying?” But Dave’s not actually stressed about it. Even if the world did end, his world is over here, so he’s not upset. It’s very selfish and maybe he should feel bad about that, too, but he really just can’t feel bad right now. So this is how everyone else over here feels all the time. Completely at peace. He tucks his chin on top of Klaus’ head. As perfect a fit as he remembered.

Klaus pulls back and props up on his elbow so he can see Dave’s face. He opens his mouth to say something, but in an uncharacteristic move, stops himself. 

“Come on, share.” For so long he’s been without Klaus’ voice; he’s not about to miss out on it now. “What are you thinking?”

“Two things,” Klaus says, “but they’re both embarrassing.”

Dave hums but doesn’t say anything, just smiles at him. He’s been smiling nonstop, so that’s not really new, but it’s pulling hard on the left which means it’s probably looking a little smug and a little mischievous. Klaus ducks his head but it doesn’t hide the way his cheeks are flushed. 

He gives in with a sound that is both a sigh and a chuckle, and rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “Alright, fine. I was just thinking about how you - ” Klaus stops short again, and Dave gets the sense he’s picking his words carefully. He bites his bottom lip and locks eyes with Dave when he’s chosen them. “About how much I love you.”

This isn’t new information, Dave already knew this, knew this with such deep certainty that the suggestions of circumstance to the contrary had caused him decades of near-debilitating dissonance, and yet, those words from that shining face, the soft kiss Klaus presses to his collarbone, it's velvety real proof that Dave isn’t imagining this perfect reunion. It does things to him.

Klaus goes on, “And I was thinking about how incredible, how amazing and impressive and frankly, very sexy, that I personally am,” in a gesture Klaus had once explained as being ‘necessary to hold in all of the emotions,’ he presses his hand to his heart, “to have found you. Finally.”

“Actually, that part is a little weird.” Dave shifts into more of a sitting position. “It’s supposed to be that if you want to be with someone and you’re both here, you’re just there. You’re together.” He has to clear his throat to say, “If you both want to be.”

It’s ridiculous, getting choked up about it now when every bit of Klaus is here and snuggled in close and telling him the opposite, but it is still what’s happening. Dave’s worried about Klaus not really wanting to be here with him.

“Ah, no, that’s not - ” Klaus sits up too, cross-legged in the center of the bed. “You know that thing where I can see dead people? Turns out _seeing_ dead people is the least of what I can do re: death. So I’m here, now, but I’m not - I’m not going to be able to stay.”

Dave doesn’t want to be disappointed that his boyfriend isn’t dead, so he’s not. He’s not going to be, and he doesn’t really have any reason to be, anyway. Everyone gets here eventually, and until then, well, Klaus isn’t dead but he _is_ magic, so. “You’re not actually dead, you’re just visiting.”

“That’s essentially the gist of it, yeah.” Klaus talks around the fingernail he’s biting. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here, probably not a lot more, it’s not a science. I haven’t really figured it all out yet. But it shouldn’t be so hard for me to find you again, now that I’ve actually done it. I can come right back here, I won’t have to keep searching. I think.”

Again, Dave proves to himself that he is not a good person, not the kind of person that deserves a peaceful, happy afterlife, and definitely not a person who deserves this priceless gift of a human sitting there across from him, because the main thing he heard in that explanation is that Klaus spent a long time searching, hard. For Dave. He feels like he’s glowing just thinking about it, and it’s a selfish reaction, but there it is.

“So that’s what took you so long,” he says, instead of ‘tell me more about the lengths to which you were driven by the depths of your love for me.’ It feels like the better comment until he sees something pained flicker across Klaus’ face.

“Well, yeah, that, and also, I didn’t mention, but,” Klaus puts up weak jazz hands, “I’m from the future. Ta da.”

Dave doesn’t have a quick response for that. It makes a lot make more sense than it doesn’t, and he’s already toyed with the concept, so it’s not a question of disbelief. His mouth hangs half open as all kinds of oddities line up and fall neatly into place.

Klaus doesn’t know the reason behind his silence, though, and he rambles on, “It’s not ‘the future’ for me, obviously, it’s my present, and yikes, can I get a gift receipt please, ugh, but after you - well, after you came here, I guess - I went back.”

“To the future,” Dave puts in, because he’s not shocked but he is marveling.

Something about that makes Klaus crack up. “Yeah, that’s right,” he says, “I went back to the future.” It’s not enough to banish the darker mood he’s slipping into, and he swallows his smile. “I went back and I left you here for so long. I didn’t realize, I didn’t think - ” His eyes are glassy from the tears he’s holding back. Dave puts his hand out to him and Klaus falls into the space it opens up, folds into the crook of his arm where he fits like they were made as a matching set. 

He whispers shaky, unnecessary apologies into Dave’s chest as Dave pets his head. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. It felt like forever to me, it was so _long_, but I didn’t actually live through all of those years.”

“Well,” Dave says mildly, “technically, neither did I.”

Klaus’ laughter is wet, but it is laughter. He says, “I wish I could stay.”

He can’t, though. They don’t get much more time together before he’s gone.

“Shit,” Klaus says, out of the blue. He grips his torso. “Damn it. Listen, I’ll be back, okay? I promise, I’ll be back.”

Then he’s just not there anymore. It's just an empty glass by an empty chair pushed back from the table in Dave’s once again empty house. 

Empty but for himself. His house isn’t properly empty for about a week, because once Klaus is gone, all he can really remember about the explanation he’d been given was that Klaus could find Dave now that he knew where to look, and he’s not terribly clear on how specific a location that is. He couldn’t have Klaus come all the way over here just to miss him because he went out for a stroll around the park. He’d also forgotten to get any further specifics on where exactly in ‘the future’ Klaus is from so that Dave could go and find him for himself.

He spends an unpleasant week vacillating wildly between the opposing viewpoints of ‘at least this is better than all of the time before, because now you know that you can and will see him again,’ and ‘this is somehow even worse, because now you know that you _can_ see him, but you simply aren’t.’

All of the arguments for and against these concepts take place out loud, by himself, while he’s camped out in his living room, sleeping on the couch so that if Klaus comes by, Dave will be sure to hear him. The only thing that gets him out of the room is the fact that this is his house, not Vietnam, so he does have access to a shower and a responsibility to his loved ones to use it regularly.

The first thing Klaus says the second time he shows up at Dave’s door is, “Sorry,” and because his brain has forgotten how to play an active role supervising the things coming out of his mouth when he sees Klaus, the first thing Dave says is, “You don’t have to knock.”

Dave intends for their second visit to be more of an investigative one that it turns out to be. There are so so many questions, so much to catch up on, but they still manage to stay busy with a few different things before they get down to brass tacks.

There are a couple of fundamental truths about their situation that Klaus is very determined to make clear, including that he wants to be here and that he loves Dave and that he will always come back. Less heart-warming is the disclaimer that he doesn’t have a great handle on this ability, and time runs differently over here than there, and so the timing between his visits is going to be completely unpredictable and probably include longer gaps than either of them is going to like.

“You got here so quickly after the carnival, last time,” Dave points out. “It was just a few hours, for me.” That’s not the way he would have described them at the time, during what had felt like the longest night of his life. If you’ll pardon the expression. He doesn’t understand how these magical powers work, so encouragement is the most help he can provide for now.

“I did, yeah.” Klaus scratches at his belly and shakes his head. “But that was - I don’t know that I’m going to be able to replicate that.” 

It’s not ideal, however many years made up of weeks that feel like decades until Klaus is here for good, but Dave can manage. He’ll figure out ways to make the in-betweens beautiful, too. He thinks of his mom learning to play piano as a surprise for his father when he showed up. Klaus likes music, too. 

“Probably not going to be as fast a turnaround as this time, either,” Klaus says, putting a stop to Dave’s planning and a pit in his stomach.

“That’s okay,” he says anyway, even though he doesn’t feel okay about it. He brightens up when he remembers they have other options. “Let me show you something.”

Blinking in the sunlight he hasn’t seen in days, Dave leads the way. It’s only a left turn and a short walk. “When are you from?” he asks.

Klaus says the name of his hometown before he hears the question properly. “Oh. It’s 2019.” While Dave’s brain is still wrapping around that, Klaus grins and knocks his shoulder. “I was born in 1989, you nasty old cradle-robber, you.”

He’d told Dave last time that he was from the future, but there’s the future and then there’s The Future and then there’s 2019. There’s his boyfriend who was born 50 years after him. He’s already done the ‘no wonder I couldn’t find him’ thing, over the past few days, but it’s hitting him again, and more. ‘No Wonder I Couldn’t Find Him.’

They round the corner, turning onto the street that leads back over there. It’s not flashy, like a time-travel ghost portal sounds like it ought to be, but it is odd looking, a short way down the dead-end lane, enough space for a bench and a couple of trees along the sidewalk before the whole thing just isn’t. It’s not that the world disappears into a void, but more like there is a pane of glass in front of them, fogged with damp warmth and speckled with small imperfections like raindrops. The road beyond stretches to a shadowed distance that somehow feels both farther away and closer than it should be.

Dave throws his arm open in presentation. “Where do you want to go?”

Klaus has fallen behind, and for a guy who can see the dead, he’s looking pretty spooked. “What is that thing?” he asks, not taking his eyes off it for a second.

“It lets me go visit. I know it looks weird,” Dave says, hurrying to explain. “We can drop back in, revisit good times, see how people are doing later on. We can go wherever, whenever you want, a childhood memory, or - ”

“No.” Dave’s brain reminds him, too slow, about the terrible father. But Klaus goes on, reaching his hand out halfway towards the diaphanous barrier. “I don’t think I should touch that.” 

“That’s alright,” Dave says. “We can stay here. But I can use it myself, later, to come and visit you over there.”

“I don’t - I’m not sure you should do that.” Klaus is still staring at the thing like it’s going to snap out and bite him. He can talk to ghosts and travel through time and go back and forth from the afterlife, but this road is, apparently, a road too far.

“Okay,” Dave says slowly, trying to understand. “I have before, though.”

“Not me. I think if I - ” Klaus’ GOODBYE palm skirts closer before he yanks it back like he’s been shocked. “I think I might get stuck. You might get stuck, if you came and visited me. With my ghost magnet thing.”

“Well, you would know better than me,” Dave concedes. But he’s not actually sure. And maybe the intuition of ghost powers take a back seat to the hunches of an actual ghost.

“Me, know stuff? Sounds fake,” Klaus says, working lightness back into his tone as he leaves the portal behind and they head back to Dave’s house. Dave knows him well enough to recognize that he is working at it, so he leaves the subject alone. His words of encouragement aren’t without ground - he’s sure he’ll see Klaus again soon enough.

‘Soon enough’ is relative.

He’s walking with Rachel across town to the little farm where anything that grows can always be found ripe and ready to be picked. He’s planning on doing some baking, just in case someone happens to show up later today and happens to still be there by the time breakfast comes around tomorrow and happens to be the kind of person who might be impressed by Dave baking a loaf of strawberry bread.

It’s the first time he’s seen her since the carnival. They haven’t gone much more than a block when she shrewdly observes, “You’re in a good mood.”  
Dave is swinging a little wicker basket back and forth as he traipses to a berry patch so he can make baked goods for the person he’s head-over-heels in love with and who loves him right back. He whistled the whole way over to Rachel’s house. There’s no denying that Dave is in a decidedly better mood than he has been in quite some time. 

So obviously he pretends like he has no idea what she’s talking about with a non-committal hum, because she is his big sister after all and he can’t make it too easy for her. “Isn’t everyone, over here?”

“Yeah, that is how it’s supposed to be,” she says, her eyes narrow. “Yes.”

He just grins at her.

“Is this about some guy or The Guy?”

“Rachel!” He’s scandalized by the very idea that there could be just some other random guy that would light up his heart like this.

“People do that, you know,” she says. “Not everyone is a one-and-done, hopeless romantic like you.”

“I’m not!” he protests, and he can’t stop himself from adding, the most ridiculous thing he’s ever said, “Not hopeless, anyway. Not anymore.” He also can’t stop the heat in his face or dampen the smile that’s taken over.

“Oh my.” Rachel draws the vowels out long. “Oh my gosh, look at you!” She sounds entirely too delighted.

“The Guy,” he says primly, instinctually trying for aloof when his sister has so entirely got his number.

It doesn’t work, she just continues on, just like she was always going to. “Oh my gosh. I never got to see you like this. You’re so smitten, it’s adorable!”

“‘Adorable.’ The way every man likes to be described.”

“Is _he_ adorable? He must be. Look at you!”

“Actually maybe you could stop looking at me.” His face is as hot as the sun; he’s sure it must be blinding. He holds open the short half-gate for her and she elbows him as she walks through.

“You didn’t answer my question though.” She positions herself in between him and the bushes with her hands on her hips. “Is he adorable?”

Trying to dart around her in a mad dash to the strawberries won’t be dignified, and it won’t really work. He does the only thing he can do, and he wants to be sullen about it, but he can’t keep the happy smugness out of his voice when he says, “Obviously.”

“Dave!” she squeals gleefully, slapping her hands over her mouth. He takes advantage of the moment to step nimbly around her. She stays staring at him as he plops a few berries in his basket, and he jerks his head at her to come over and help. The whole reason he’d invited her along was for her to help. Ostensibly.

“Dave,” she says again, still terribly pleased, but in a manner more befitting a lady who’d lived more than sixty years. Less shrieking. “I never thought I’d get to see you like this.”

He doesn’t mean it in exactly the same way, but it’s close enough. “Me neither.”

Kneeling down next to him in the strawberry patch, she takes his hands and beams at him. “I have to meet him.”

There are a number of roadblocks to Rachel meeting Klaus, although Dave is a little surprised and pleased to discover they are mostly practical ones. Back when he was alive, the prospect of anyone he knew meeting someone he had feelings like this for would have been out of the question, for multiple reasons, and one of them would have been simply good old-fashioned mortification. But with Rachel, over here, now, and with Klaus… He actually doesn’t hate the idea, he maybe even likes it.

But it’s going on weeks since Klaus’ second visit, and even keeping it on a rotation, he might be pushing the limit of how often it’s acceptable to drop off unsolicited baked goods to his neighbors. He can’t bear to eat any of it himself when he made it to share. 

The way to keep himself getting up and out of bed in the morning is by choosing, daily, to believe that this might be the day Klaus comes by, but that does make lonesome nights even harder. When Klaus does show up, Dave wants him all to himself.

He’s glad he kept up with the baking. The sounds Klaus makes digging into the blackberry cobbler are obscene.

“This is heaven,” he garbles out around another forkful. “Actually, is this heaven? And actually are you any good at baking really or is it cheating because you’ve just got, you know, heavenly berries?” He chuckles to himself. “There’s a dirty joke there, give me a second to phrase it right.”

Dave will give him as much time as he wants. He’s just been sitting here listening, and he’s in no hurry to give that up, but Klaus leans forward, setting the front chair legs down on the floor, distracted himself back around to the beginning again.

“But really, is this place actually heaven? _Heaven_ heaven?”

“I don’t know.” Dave has thought about this before, and he has yet to come up with a more satisfactory answer than that. “I think it is, sort of, but not exactly. It’s the afterlife, and it’s a good place, but it isn’t dependent on anything you do. Everyone gets here eventually. Being a bad person or good person, it doesn’t factor in.”

“That’s not right.”

Dave didn’t think Klaus was so devout. He tells him as much.

“I don’t mean theologically, or whatever. Just, that’s not it. I have a brother, he’s dead, and he’s never been here, doesn’t even know it exists. I see ghosts all the fucking time, for christ’s sake. I’d have a much happier life, on the whole, if everyone came here and left me out of it.”

“And you’re not happy?”

Klaus gives him a slow, dreamy smile. It’s one of Dave’s favorite types on him, because he doesn’t show it to hardly anyone. It feels like a privilege to be its recipient, and even better to be its cause. “I’m happy here with you.”

That’s enough to derail the conversation for a while. Their conversations are always derailing. Not that Dave is complaining.

He thinks about it, in the in-between of Klaus’ visits. It’s poor naming, because Klaus is gone more often than not, so it’s more that his presence is the in-between splitting the majority of Dave’s time, but it doesn’t feel that way in terms of importance, and the waits are getting shorter. It’s still a lot of time on his own, though, and he spends some of it trying to figure out the way it all works. Probably, the one of them with ghost-whispering magical powers is the one more likely to crack the case, but Dave’s got nothing but time to mull it over.

And he’s got that one piece of the puzzle that Klaus is missing: the innate knowledge everyone gets when they arrive here. ‘Knowledge’ that’s essentially just a feeling, but still. With a batch of shortbread he doesn’t plan on eating, he decides to visit Polowski and compare their feelings on the subject.

When he arrives, it turns out someone else from ‘Nam has gotten here. His cookies are plenty enough to add to the celebratory spread. 

Julia is here now, and when she and Polowski are together, they’re inseparable in a way that would be insufferable before the carnival. Luckily, he’s not so morosely self-involved that he can’t be happy for his friends. Not that Dave was ever very close with the nurse. She had terrified him a little bit, in life. Something to do with the fierce way she was fully and unapologetically herself was intimidating and inspiring in equal measure.

Her presence makes him too shy to tell Polowski about his own recent developments in the ‘reigniting old flames’ department, but he does ask them both to dig into their understanding of this place. They think the same things he does.

It’s an odd feeling, the elation of discovery coupled with the implications that slowly sink in.

The porch swing at Dave’s house is a loveseat tonight, the perfect amount of snug to fit the two of them. Or maybe it’s been that way for a while, and Dave hasn’t had occasion to notice.

There’s a few sleepy fireflies ambling through purpling evening light; the air is thick and cool like it’s one of the final nights of summer. Last time Klaus was here, it’d been stormy, a moody winter-losing-out-to-spring kind of day, but that had only been a week ago.  
  
Dave’s arm is still stretched across the wooden backrest, but Klaus has vacated his seat for now. Klaus isn’t actually upset about the fickle weather over here, but he’s pouting about it for comedic effect, and it’s more effective while animatedly pacing. “Just another one of those Properly Dead People privileges. What about the rest of the poor schmucks like me?”

“I don’t think there are any other schmucks like you, darlin’.”

Klaus pauses and flips his palms up on either side of his face in presentation. “I’m a one-of-a-kind schmuck! Sneaking into heaven to agitate for reform.”

“About that.” The swing creaks as he shifts uncomfortably. “We were talking, before, about what this place actually is and how it works? I’ve been thinking about it, and talking with Polowski.”

“Polowski!” Klaus’ newly wary demeanor brightens as quickly as it had darkened. “How is that outrageous flirt?”

“He’s here, so he’s fine. Actually, you should come.” It feels like a good idea until he says it out loud. He feels defensive towards himself for suggesting sharing Klaus’ time with anyone else yet, when he’s only here in short bursts. “The guys meet up, from time to time. Have some drinks, share some stories, only it’s just folks from over there.”

Luckily, Klaus doesn’t look enthused by this plan, either. He picks at the hem of his striped shirt. “A vets meet-up. Maybe.”

“Anyway. He and Julia feel the same as me - ”

“Julia! Oh, I loved her. She was the most amazing woman, huh?”

“Watch it,” Dave jokes, “you’re my boyfriend. And I’m - I’m trying to tell you something.”

Klaus mimes zipping his lips and throwing away the key, and then immediately opens his mouth to say, “Go for it, babe.” Dave loves this beautiful idiot so much. He lingers in that warm feeling before he wades back into the less fun bits.

“It’s one of those things you just know when you come over here. That everyone gets here eventually. It takes some people longer to find it, if they had a hard time.” He doesn’t think Klaus needs that particular thing more spelled out, since he knows for a fact Klaus has seen plenty of those spirits, the ones too shaken by their death or still clinging helplessly to their life’s tragedies. “But eventually, they’ll sort it all out and get here. Everyone does. If this was heaven, you would think some people might not belong, since some people aren’t, you know - sometimes, people are - ”

“Assholes,” Klaus supplies for him. He leans back on the railing and scuffs his toes along one of the porch’s wide wooden seams. “Yeah, I met my dad up here once. Not looking to do that again. But I figure the bar for entry has to be pretty low.”

“Everyone gets in,” Dave nods, and Klaus doesn’t look entirely convinced, but he forges on, “but some of the bad bits, that doesn’t come over. The point of over here is that it’s nice. That it’s tender and gentle. If someone’s full of anger, they don’t bring all of that with them. That gets left behind. So I think that with some of what’s over there, what you’re seeing is less the ghost of a person, and more the echo of their anger, or their grief, or whatever bad thing.”

The sound of the crickets swells in the moment after Dave says it, nature’s quiet crescendo filling in the gap.

“That’s great,” Klaus says. “That’s really excellent. So it’s literally the worst of humanity, minus the humanity. That’s just so, so great, wow.”

The look on his face is distant and bitter and exactly the blend of difficult emotions that Dave is talking about, that aren’t supposed to make it over here. He felt some similar ones himself, when he thought it all through to its logical conclusion. When he thought about the kinds of things that Klaus’ ability make him uniquely able to experience, that he’s had to handle solely on his own.

“‘Superpower’ really is the word for it, isn’t it?” The ruthless sarcasm of Klaus’ laughter is the type of sound ‘humorless’ was invented to describe. “What a _super_ power!” He clenches a fist in his hair like he’s going to rip it all out of his head, and then he releases it, patting at the cowlicks like that’s going to tame them. He slumps back onto the swing, his gaze landing below Dave’s feet, and he apologizes. “I’ll shut up, I’ll be quiet. I’m just feeling sorry for myself.”

It’s Dave’s turn to run fingers through Klaus’ hair. “You don’t need to shut up. I feel sorry for you, too.” Klaus stiffens and Dave worries that may have come across wrong. “That must be so hard to deal with.”

He can’t see Klaus’ face when he says, “You’re too nice to me. You spoil me, Dave.” Dave is about to protest everything that’s wrong about that sentiment when Klaus’ head snaps up, his eyes wide.

“That was you!” he says. “When I saw you that night, in Vietnam, when there were two of you. I thought it was the drugs, or my stupid brain, but it was _you_. You dick!” His laughter sounds a lot more like what laughter is supposed to sound like. “You bastard. I thought you were dead!”

“I was,” Dave shrugs.

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as ghosts from the future, though! You could have told me, you could have - ” 

There is a staggering amount of things that Dave could have told him. Enough to change a lot of things, probably too many things. Enough that they could avoid his death, as many times as they needed to, really. They could change the course of the war, they could fix everything and anything they wanted to, ad infinitum.

“That is way too big a loophole,” Klaus says. “Everyone could just get whatever they wanted all the time.” He sounds a little delighted and a little horrified.

“I think plenty of people do try, but you’re the only one who can actually hear any of it.”

“Oh, yeah. Just me. But in this one, extremely rare case, ‘just me’ will be enough to handle the situation.” 

Klaus’ knee starts to bounce in excitement. Dave hates that he has to put a stop to it, but he places a heavy hand there. He’s had more time to think this over. “You’ve handled it well enough so far.”

“You have no idea,” Klaus snorts. “But this is huge. This can change everything!”

“Too much,” Dave agrees.

Klaus hears past what he isn’t saying to hear what he’s actually saying. “So, we aren’t going to do anything, then. We aren’t going to save you.” He’s too resigned already to let it be a question the way he wants it to be.

As gently as he can, Dave says, “It's not like it would be more time, exactly. Just different. Eventually we’d just get here anyway.”

“Right.” Klaus tears at the inflamed skin at his bitten down fingernails. “Everybody dies. Everyone gets the peace that they deserve.”

The despondency that settles back over them is quieter than before. It’s only fair that Klaus gets some time to process, and it’s clear that’s what he’s doing by the way his gaze keeps roaming around. 

In the end, he lets out an overflowing sigh and says simply, “I wish you weren’t dead.”

He pats at his threadbare shirt, checking his pockets for cigarettes that won’t appear from wishing, because Klaus is that one-of-a-kind schmuck to be over in this place without truly inhabiting it. Dave hands him a pack.

“Things are complicated now,” Klaus says as he lights up.

‘Complicated’ joins ‘weird’ in the understatement category. “Time travel,” he says with feeling.

“Grown-up feelings and mature decision making.” Klaus blows out smoke and shoots Dave a sideways smile. “Never thought it would happen to me.”

Dave isn’t sure how much that is meant as a joke, and how much of it is sincere. Klaus jokes about everything. Even his moments of sincerity are rarely presented as serious. He’ll frame those as jokes, too, just in case they need to be. It’s a truth-telling style Dave can see the merit in, especially these days as he’s considering inviting his parents over for dinner to meet his boyfriend, and oh, did Dave ever mention he was the type of man to have a boyfriend? He’s gay and only joking if that’s not going to be okay. 

Klaus is always giving himself less credit than he deserves, and so Dave doesn’t agree with the implication that Klaus has only recently gained emotional maturity he didn’t have back when they were both alive. But he is different, in little ways that Dave hasn’t been able to add up to a whole yet. He wonders if he seems any different to Klaus, or if death froze him in place. He doesn’t feel frozen. Surely what has changed Klaus is down to new experiences.

At first he mistook the change for a side effect of their location, that Klaus at peace doesn’t need that manic energy propelling him, and that’s probably true to an extent, but Dave comes to realize the quiet is shot through with something sadder. It’s subdued and easy to miss, which is another oddity. Klaus always felt things loud, although he was taken aback if anyone ever listened, so the intent of the volume seemed to be so that he could hear his own voice. Dave wonders if Klaus has discovered this new shade of himself yet, or if it’s been thrumming unheard inside him for a while.

Asking the question is an act of willful naïveté - Klaus was a soldier in the Vietnam War. Klaus has spent an entire lifetime living with the leftover spirits of man’s worse impulses. Klaus was involved in averting an almost-apocalypse that Dave knows practically nothing about. Whatever happened could not have been small enough to slip by unnoticed, not when it had caused such a profound impact on a person already so haunted.

Dave’s not brave enough to ask, especially when he’s saving up his courage for something else. “My sister wants to meet you.”

“Of course,” Klaus says with all the unearned, breezy confidence of a man whose hair has gone powder-white with confectioner’s sugar. After that explosive mishap, he’d spent a solid minute ranting in an over-the-top, clipped British accent about tariffs and ‘those blasted ungrateful colonies.’ Apparently Klaus hadn’t known to go slow mixing in the dry ingredients, and given that it’s a baking basic, Dave is looking forward to see what else Klaus can make go terribly, hilariously wrong.

“She says that you sound too amazing to be real and that she would think I was making you up, except - ” 

Although his forehead is scrunched in concentration, Klaus isn’t focused enough on his icing to let the comment go by. He props a dusty hand on his frilly apron and inquires, too sweetly, “Except what, peaches?”

He’s put Klaus in this situation before, they both do it to each other plenty, but part of the game is that whoever lets a slip of accidental mushiness land them in the hot seat gets all shy and coy about it, and whoever caught the other gets to be smug. Klaus is good at playing smug. He pops a frosting-coated fingertip into his mouth with a devilish grin.

But when you get down to it, Dave wants Klaus to know this, to believe this. He doesn’t want it to be a sentiment Klaus truly has to struggle to get to hear. “She knows you’re real because she can she how happy you make me.”

“Of course.” It comes a beat too late and with a shrug a tad too stilted for this to truly be as flippant a comment as Klaus is trying to make it seem. He ducks his head and gets back to work with the piping bag. The tips of his ears are tinged pink.

Dave gives himself a minute to sort through all the competing reactions - pride that he can make Klaus feel so good, anger that ‘you make me happy’ only has such a big effect because of how few times Klaus has had people tell him that before, and a tender joy that they’ve gotten to a place where expressions of love no longer shake Klaus’ bedrock quite so hard that he entirely loses the ability to speak.

“So when do I get to meet this brilliant woman? You about ready to quit hogging me all to yourself?”

“I thought we could host a dinner, for her and my folks.”

Klaus’ head snaps up, looking horrified. “Not tonight, right?” Dave shakes his head, and Klaus sighs. “Oh thank god. No one should eat these - I accidentally put in salt so I just added extra sugar to cover it up but I don’t think it’s working.”

“No, that’s not going to - ” In vain, Dave scoots around the counter, as though there’s something he can do to fix it if he just moves fast enough. “Wait, were you planning on telling me? What if I tried to eat it?”

Every bit of Klaus’ entire body, eyebrows included, are involved in his blithe shrug. “I’m not worried about impressing you anymore.”

And that’s it. Dave’s done for. These inedible cupcakes will never get finished.

“C’mere,” he says, but Klaus is already there. 

So it’s a little while before they get back to the subject. 

“I just feel like it would only be fair if everyone gets to meet you at once, so that nobody has to be last.”

“Nobody gets Premium Klaus Access,” Klaus mumbles drowsily. “Nobody but you.” 

He’s drifting away to sleep tucked into Dave’s side. Once before, in a moment very much like this one, his half-dreaming consonants flowing slow and thick, Klaus had told him, “Being here it’s quiet, and being with you it’s warm. I don’t get nightmares, or ghosts shouting at me. I can finally get some actual rest.” 

Dave thoroughly enjoys the spooning anyway, but certainly after that comment, he could never think of the time Klaus spent asleep over here as wasted. He’s not sure if Klaus is going to rouse back awake when he says, “I haven’t told my parents yet.” Maybe that’s why he picks now to say it.

Klaus hums to show he’s listening. Dave feels it thrumming through his ribs. It’s not proof that he’s conscious enough to remember any of this, or that he’ll be able add anything more substantial to the conversation than noises of affirmation. 

He goes on, tracing tangling circles through Klaus’ thick dark hair. “My sister, I told her about you, so she knows, but my parents - I just don’t know what they’ll say. They’re loving, lovely people, but dad was born near the turn of the century. The turn of _my_ century. Odds are good he’s got certain opinions. About me being - ” He’s nervous to say it out loud even to Klaus, which is ridiculous. Klaus is currently snuggled up to Dave’s naked chest, a position he’s occupied plenty of times before. He’s not going to be horrified and shocked by Dave admitting to being gay.

“What’s he going to do?” Klaus says, not asleep after all. Dave doesn’t have an answer for him, and that’s essentially the entire problem. If he just knew what would happen, he could make an informed choice instead of staying stuck in this anxiety limbo where the love of his parents is held hostage.

“Like, ‘watch out, Dave, he might to cut you out of the will,’” Klaus giggles. “It’s not like he can tell you that you’re going to hell for liking cock, now can he?”

Which is a good point. 

“Or, like, what,” Klaus sniggers, and puts on a performative, pearl-clutching tone, “‘My son? A homosexual? Over my dead body!’”

Dave’s first, knee-jerk reaction is to think that this is not at all funny; this is about the possible loss of his parent’s fickle ‘unconditional’ love. Except there’s another part of him saying it absolutely is exactly that funny. It’s a stupid thing for people to get upset over - how is it even a problem for two people to find genuine love? He can’t control whether or not his parents reject him, but he can decide if he deserves rejection.

He doesn’t. He doesn’t deserve to feel bad about this wonderful beautiful life-changing love. He laughs, and laughs and laughs, along with his wonderful beautiful life-changing Klaus. He squeezes him up in a hug so tight it makes him yelp, and rains kisses down on him like worship.

“You could mention how I don’t entirely identify as a man anyway, if you think it’ll help,” Klaus gasps, before he’s not forming sentences anymore. 

Dave does not think that will help. It took him a little while to wrap his own brain around that concept, so he’ll save that conversation for a later time. Assuming that this upcoming one doesn’t put a stop to any and all future conversations between him and his parents. 

He should have known not to decide to have the big coming out talk with them after his father’s jazz quintet concert in the park, because he has to sit through too many jazz tunes wound up in a tight ball of anxiety. The sun heating up the grass would be lovely at any other time, but now it’s just hot and making the back of his neck prickle.

What _would_ help is having Klaus here with him, but that doesn’t feel fair. Because Klaus even seems to be looking forward to meeting them. Family-phobic _Klaus._ He still winces his way around subjects like childhood or fathers like he’s favoring a bruise. If this turns into a ‘no son of mine is a fucking faggot’ moment, or its not-so-distant cousins, ‘that can’t be true,’ or ‘I’m just disappointed,’ well, it won’t do Klaus any good to see that. Both for his own sake, and because it’s a bad first impression to start what will become a long and positive relationship between his parents and his love. This won’t be the last conversation he has with them; this can’t be a problem for all of eternity. Dave won’t allow it.

“You’ve made me so domestic,” Klaus had purred in accusation. “I’d love to meet your family.”

“I don’t know how that’s my fault,” Dave said, about the first part, skipping right past the second one since his heart still missed a beat when he thought about that.

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing, babe, and I don’t know the hows of it either, but I have never before fantasized about cooking dinner with someone.” 

Dave let out a low whistle. “Tell me more about these fantasies of yours.” 

“Don’t get excited,” Klaus had groaned. “That’s what I’m saying! The fantasy is that we’re cooking - well, _you’re_ cooking - dinner, and I’m staying away from the open flame and sharp knives and, you know, the food. I’m just, like, washing dishes and when you walk past I stick out my cute little butt at you as a distraction but we’re still just, in the kitchen, doing cooking stuff. That’s the whole thing.” He sighed dramatically. “You’re turning me into a real straightedge, Katz.”

Dave needs this fantasy to be a reality. He can make it real. Not in these early days, when Klaus’ visits are so unpredictable. The meal prep and teaching Klaus kitchen basics might have to wait for when he is here full-time, but until then, Dave can get the ball rolling. Have everyone meet. Tell his parents the truth.

His rubs sweaty palms on his pant leg after the music ends, after his father packs up his fiddle. His heart doesn’t need to be pounding like this; his father has never been a violent man. He doesn’t even have reason to believe that this will make him angry - but he doesn’t have any reason to believe it won’t, either. If he opens his mouth, he’s going to throw up. 

He says, “I want you all to come to dinner. I want you all to meet someone.” Rachel’s wearing the same face she wore when he had just turned sixteen and asked for permission to spend his summer vacation hitch-hiking to the west coast and back. Her eyebrows are up to her hairline and her mouth is pursed tightly closed to hide her incredulous smile. “The person I’m in love with.”

“Oh, darling, I didn’t know you had a girlfriend! How lovely.” His mother claps her hands together. “When? I should bring a cake.”

“No,” Dave says, his voice loud in his own head, “I’m making pie.” And here’s when it happens, when the presumptions go out the window. If he can be brave enough. They’ve already walked more than halfway home. He doesn’t want this to turn into a whole long talk, doesn’t want to linger outside his door while he keeps on sidestepping the actual point of what he means to say. “His name is Klaus.”

He watches his feet walking, one in front of the other. He can feel his pulse all the way down in his stomach.

It’s quiet, and now he doesn’t know what he wanted from this, if he’d like confetti and a party, or if it’d be best if no one speaks of this again. The moment feels like it’s spinning on for too long and maybe what he wants is a shouting match if at least that would put an end to the silence.

Rachel speaks up first. “I’m so excited to meet him! They met over in the war, Mom and Dad, and he’s got Dave smitten like you’d never believe.” She chatters away, relaying whatever bits of trivia she’s gleaned from Dave previously, gossiping just the same as she did about the few girls Dave had dated way back when. 

He can’t be sure if this place is exactly ‘heaven,’ but there’s no question that having Rachel as his big sister is a blessing.

All in all, it really could have gone worse. Probably it also could have gone better, presumably there is some kind of specific checklist that an ideal coming-out would meet, but Dave is fine with it. More than fine. He can’t believe how much better he feels about all of it, now. It seems as though his parents are accepting, and if they aren’t, there’s nothing more he needs to do about it. He no longer has to worry about controlling things that are entirely out of his control. It’s incredibly freeing.

He can’t wait to tell Klaus.

But he has to.

It’s a longer wait than it has been for a while, which is when Dave realizes that Klaus’ visits have been growing more frequent. He hasn’t had to go more than a few days without him in a long time. His mom and dad swing by two mornings after the concert asking about when they’ll get to meet Klaus, a very sweet gesture after two days of fricative radio silence, and Dave doesn’t have an answer for them. He lets them know that the situation is a little bit unconventional, that Klaus is only visiting over here for the time being, and the invitation will be short notice by necessity. The scheduling won’t be easy, but now that he’s out, he’s itching for the introductions to just happen already so they can get on with folding Klaus into their family get-togethers.

But he has to wait, and they have to wait, and waiting is what everyone has to do. He scolds the bratty, self-centered part of him that wishes that Klaus would just hurry up and get here permanently already.

Then Klaus finally does show up, and everyone still has to wait. He arrives flat on his back in the grass across the street. It’s lucky that Dave is on his way to the library and spots him pop into existence, because Klaus doesn’t get up on his own. 

“Finally finally finally,” he’s whispering as Dave reaches his side. “It’s done, it’s over, finally finally it’s over.”

He doesn’t know what to say. He’s been riding high lately, free of the kind of environmentally inappropriate emotions that are welling up in him now at the sight of his lover lying on the ground, curling in on himself. He is reminded, sickly, of that time back in the early days of Klaus’ tour and the slow way he roused back to life after the mine that had killed everyone else. “Klaus?”

His eyes flutter open. “Dave.” His smile is like melting. “I’m here.”

“I know.” That’s the only part he does know. He’s entirely out of the loop on everything else. “What is going on? What’s happening?”

Klaus stretches out a non-committal vowel sound and tilts his head, a weak horizontal head shake. “I’m here now, so,” he pushes himself to a very unsteady upright, “anything that was happening has now stopped happening.” He makes a beeline to Dave’s house - if bees ever got terribly drunk on the job and flew from flower to flower in staggering, wavering lines. So it’s more like a Klaus-line, although Klaus said he’s been sober for as long as Dave’s seen him over here. Dave can only trail after him.

He lounges on Dave’s couch and flashes him a smile that Dave would have described as dazzling if he didn’t know him better. Or if he hadn’t seen... whatever it was he just saw. He hopes that he would see the lie even without witnessing that first.

“Have you cooked up any new gastronomic delights?” Klaus asks. “I don’t want to be too demanding of a house guest, but I am absolutely famished.” He pats his tummy and stretches his body out long, consciously settling into comfort. “Your divine cooking doesn’t do a lot for me back there, I mean in a physical sense, but still.”

Dave takes a step towards the kitchen out of polite habit but that’s not the way he wants to go. Crouching beside the sofa, he puts his hand on Klaus’ knee. “Hey. Please. Don’t do that. Talk to me. What happened?”

“Can we not - could we not go through it all right now?” 

Klaus has such an expressive face. Emotions play across it, as easy to see as looking into the sun. But there are just _so many_ \- it’s impossible to untangle them all. There’s love in there, that much is obvious, and a given; there’s sadness, which is also, unfortunately, a given. He’s never seen Klaus completely without it.

It means that even without words, Klaus can communicate a lot. And it means that when Klaus communicates, it’s often not very concrete. So the question is whether Dave allows the emotional honesty to be enough, or if he demands real answers. Usually, he picks the first option, which is the reason why he knows so little about Klaus’ past. He knows that talking about it is painful, and he can’t bear to be something that causes Klaus pain. But he’s starting to wonder if that’s the right thing to do. If not talking about it now does nothing to make the pain go away, and just stockpiles up the hurting for later.

“What I’d really like right now is to just - if I could just get some rest, for now, here with you?”

Dave doesn’t have a chance against those pleading green eyes. He just gives in. First option. But he wonders.

Klaus describes it as, “A mix-up with some folks with a grudge against my brother, who sincerely overestimated my importance in Luther’s life. They were a bit disappointed, but if they’d done better research, they would have known to expect that, so it’s all their own fault, really.”

That’s the ‘detailed’ explanation. Dave can’t help but notice how light it is in actual details.

The catnap perked Klaus up, so maybe he can pry a little deeper now. The lightweight tale is incongruous with the effect it’s had on Klaus, and he wants to pry, he really really does. He’s still struggling to decide if he wants this for Klaus’ benefit or to satisfy his own curiosity when Klaus speaks up.

“I wish you hadn’t seen that.”

Dave hates to ask, because he wants to be certain enough in them that honesty is a guarantee. “Would you have told me about it if I hadn’t?”

“Absolutely not.”

It’s not at all the answer Dave expected, and the opposite of what he wants. It lands like a punch to the gut and forces out an embarrassing little sound of hurt.

“Dave, I - ” Klaus pulls away, and Dave refuses to take that as a metaphor. They are soulmates, they are here together in the afterlife, literally as ‘happily forever after’ as a couple can get. Although, comments a voice of quivering panic somewhere down in his stomach, Klaus isn’t properly here. He’s still alive. He has plenty of time to change his mind before he makes it over here permanently. 

“Everything about me is and always has been a huge mess. I don’t know how my powers work,” Klaus says. “I think I might have some effects that I don’t mean to. Like how Ben is stuck over there when he should be able to come over here, or how you can feel bad stuff over here, and I don’t think you should be able to do that. I think it’s my fault.”

Dave has spent decades suspecting this same thing. All he wants to do now is deny it.

“I don’t want to bring bad stuff with me over here to you, and I don’t want you to come over there and get stuck because of me.” He rakes fingers through his already mostly vertical hair. “Fuck, I’m already nervous enough about your family hating me, I can’t take you away from them. And this way is working, isn’t it? It works. It’s just fine. So I just don’t want to ruin things any more than I already am.”

Klaus doesn’t want to be responsible for making a hard thing worse. Dave feels the same way. He lets it go.

“Speaking of my family,” he says, “I told them. About you. And me.” He’s inexplicably shy about it, for an odd, fleeting moment. Even with the ambiguous wording, the smile that takes over his face tells the story of the outcome. “I came out to my parents. We’re going to do dinner, all of us.”

Klaus’ mouth drops open. “Dave! You didn’t! Babe, that’s amazing!”

Klaus is thrilled for him, and Dave is still thrilled about it himself, and the visit ends on a much better note than it began, but it took some effort to get there, which is not usually necessary, not with them.

It’s cute how nervous Klaus is about it, until it’s not. He’s rubbing at his elbows compulsively, when he’s not tearing at his scalp, and he can’t pick a place to stand, roaming around the little kitchen as Dave cooks dinner. “I don’t have the best, you know, track record, with the parental figures in my life.”

It looks like the clover rolls could use a few more minutes. Dave pushes the oven door closed again. “What about the other times you’ve done this? How did the ‘meet the parents’ thing go then?” He knows Klaus never got along with his own father, but Dave figures that with the future being so open and accepting, there must be plenty of idyllic experiences Klaus can draw on. Instead, he grimaces like Dave is missing an obvious point.

“Most people don’t need a parental stamp of approval on the hot piece of ass they’re about to bang in the club bathroom, not unless their family situation is even more fucked up than mine, and I’m a kinky son of a bitch but even _I_ have limits. Presumably.”

He slams to a stop on the far side of the island and covers his mouth with both hands. “What if I say something like that, when they’re here? I’ll say something like that or worse and your poor parents will be so disappointed, that the first boy their perfect son brings home is such fuck-up.”

“First and only, peaches.” Dave sets the pot holders down because there is something more important than dinner now requiring his full attention. He gently unfolds Klaus’ clenched fist and traces the HELLO on his palm before he flips it over to press a kiss behind his knuckles. Threading their fingers together, he says, “You did say you wanted to meet them.”

“I do! I do,” Klaus says. “I just wish there was a way that I could do that without them having to meet me, too.” The brief spell of calm dissipates; he starts biting his nails again. “I don’t want to embarrass you in front of them.”

“You really haven’t done this before, then.” Dave starts pulling plates out of the cabinet to set the table. “The point of today, for them, is almost entirely a competition to see who can find the best ways to embarrass me in front of you.”

No one would be able to spot Klaus’ nerves once Dave’s family arrives. No one else but Dave, anyway. His eyeliner is smudged heavy and thick under his lower lashes. It makes his always gorgeous eyes even more expressive than usual. Just as his parents walk up to the door, Dave is slammed with an inexplicable urge to straighten Klaus’ collar, which is absurd because he’s wearing a v-neck. 

Dave doesn’t think Klaus notices the stuttering rhythm of the introductions, the missed beat when his father goes to shakes Klaus’ hand and is taken aback by the words tattooed there. If Klaus does pick up on it, he doesn’t seem put off, but then, he’s a theatrical person, performance is in his nature. 

Once they sit down at the dinner table, any strain between Dave’s parents and Klaus fades away. Klaus’ aversion to taking anything seriously, particularly himself, makes for easy dinner party banter. This is no surprise to Dave, but he appreciates it too much to take it for granted, because Dave himself is a bit of a mess about it all.

Rachel, of all people, got a little furrow in her brow when Klaus introduced himself, and has been unexpectedly quiet since then. So it’s up to Klaus and the parents that had intimidated him so much to carry on a perfectly amicable conversation by themselves. While Rachel silently pushes salad around her plate and squints at Dave’s boyfriend, Dave stares at her, trying to figure out what her problem is.

Even only half-listening, Dave knows the conversation is going to take a turn when his parents finish their tag-team story about their first date and his mother asks, “How did your parents meet, Klaus?”

Klaus tilts his head and hedges. His leg starts bouncing in double-time under the table. “Well, it’s sort of hard to say. I wasn’t actually raised by my birth mother.”

“Oh! Hargreeves,” Rachel blurts out. Klaus’ leg freezes, along with the rest of him. “Klaus _Hargreeves._ The Séance! I knew there was something, but I couldn’t place it. You’re Number Four!”

It seems like his sister has lost her marbles, but the unintelligible string of words apparently means something to Klaus, who says mildly, “Always nice to meet a fan.” Now that Dave’s incredulous gaze has shifted onto Klaus, he can see the tension in his smile, but he doubts that it’s visible to the others.

“You remember Sir Reginald Hargreeves and the kids in ’89, the 43? This was after you, Mom. But,” Rachel gestures at their dad, “the billionaire who adopted those kids. You remember?”

With renewed interest, Dad looks at Klaus, who is looking at the table, at the walls, at anything but anyone’s face. “Ah,” Dad says, because here’s someone else in on the loop that Dave is being excluded from.

“The Umbrella Academy,” Rachel says to Dave, like she’s clarifying something, but he’s got nothing. “You know, the superhero kids? I was telling you about them. He can talk to the dead - that’s _us,_ now - he’s Number Four.”

Dave repeats it, “Number Four?” and Klaus winces in his periphery. “What are you saying?”

“That's what he was called,” Rachel shoots back, with the defensive neck swivel she always used to do when they got into arguments as teenagers.

Klaus clears his throat. “Technically, ‘Klaus’ is only a nickname.”

“You never said…” He’s never said any of this. There’s so much Klaus - Number Four? - hasn’t told him. “What’s your actual name?”

Klaus’ adam’s apple bobs a few time before he turns to face Dave. He keeps his lashes down. “Zero Zero Point Zero Four,” he says lightly, enunciation crisp and clipped. “For a name with no letters, it always seemed so wordy to me, don’t you think? Even Dad just called me Number Four.”

“That’s what everyone called him,” Rachel says. 

They’re stuck in this weird conversational triangle where they can all hear each other, but she talks to Dave as if Klaus isn’t really there, and Dave talks to Klaus like Rachel isn’t there. Klaus is stuck at cross purposes between them. Dave should help him out of the awkward position, he knows he should, but there’s so much new information whirring through his brain that he can’t process. He doesn’t have the capacity to be as gracious as he should be right now. 

‘Everyone’ called him that. “You were famous?”

“Only a little bit. In the 2000s.” He says it with a dismissive shrug, like the decade devalues the prestige.

“We didn’t hear about the name until the book.”

“Oh, fabulous. You’ve read the book.”

“And there’s a book?”

Klaus pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay, and in the 2010s. Briefly. ‘Infamy’ is probably the better word.”

Anger shouldn’t be what Dave is feeling towards Klaus right now, but it is. Coloring the edges of his mind. Anger and annoyance. This whole mess of a conversation is nonsensical. How are there so many things, so many big important things, that Dave didn’t know?

“Wasn’t that a bit of a rough childhood? I didn’t read the book myself, I just remember hearing something like that.”

“Well, I suppose crime-fighting can be a little stressful, especially when you’re, you know, a preteen, even if you are just the lookout,” Klaus says. “And not that anybody’s asking, but a person who sees things that aren’t really there is a uniquely poor choice to fill that role, but that’s just my opinion.”

Famous preteen crime-fighting Klaus. Adopted billionaire’s son with a rough childhood. It’s not that it’s so unbelievable, it’s just a lot to reconcile. A lot of shifting perceptions.

It’s a lot for his parents to take in, too. “How,” Dave’s mother asks, “did the two of you meet?”

“Time travel,” Klaus tells her matter-of-factly, flapping his hand like it’s unimportant. "It was this whole, time-travel, thing.”

His father says, “That’s quite a life story you've got there, son.”

Klaus coughs on his drink, and Rachel launches into a description of as much of his life story as she knows, starting with an immaculate conception, and Dave really wants to hear all of this, but he wants to have heard it from a different voice, so his brain disconnects from his ears and he stares at Klaus without seeing much of anything. Just like he’s been doing all this time, apparently. 

Just once, Klaus lets himself look at Dave. His gaze darts away again almost immediately, like it’s skidding off of slippery ice. Dave doesn’t want to burn cold. That’s not the kind of man he wants to be.

Rachel is talking about some museum heist that was foiled by Klaus and his siblings. “When they were - how old were you?”

“Fourteen.” Klaus smiles as he says it - he hasn’t stopped smiling, actually, since the stories began - but under the table, he’s gripping the fabric of his pant leg in a fist so tight his knuckles are whited out. There’s a few things Dave can see, after all. 

“The whole thing ended in this massive shoot-out. You could watch it live all over the news.”

Live on the news at fourteen. Rachel, who’s never met him before today, feeling comfortable enough telling all of these stories right in front of him, like she has some partial ownership of Klaus’ life, because the bits of it that she witnessed were on tv. In such a public position, from such a young age, maybe Klaus never was given much of a choice to decide what kind of person he wanted to be. 00.04. Certainly since this conversation started, he hasn’t been given much of a say.

Rachel is telling the story about the side of Klaus that she knows, the public side, and he’s listening and laughing along like she’s telling the truth, but it’s not. Dave knows what she’s saying is not the full truth because he knows the truth of Klaus. Dave has been left out of the facts of Klaus’ life, but he knows the truths, and he knows his tells. 

He knows that everything about this situation is making Klaus very uncomfortable. They have a lot to talk about, evidently enough to fill a book, but he sets it aside to deal with later. For now, he reaches out to rubs his thumb across Klaus’ clenched fingers. After a moment, Klaus pulls his hand away, and Dave’s heart sinks into a panic. But it’s only that Klaus wanted to flip his hand over, palm up and open. An invitation, a request for comfort. They hold on to each other.

“I can’t believe we let the kids watch it, now that I’m thinking about it. It was all so violent sometimes,” Rachel is saying. “Oh, but my granddaughters were such big fans.”

“Well, you can’t expect kids to know any better,” Klaus says wryly.

“They dressed up as umbrella kids for Halloween.”

“Who’s their favorite?” Klaus asks. “That’s the real test."

“The eldest, Michelle, she always had a bit of a crush on Number Five, before he left.”

He grins. “He’s back now! Looks exactly the same as he did back then. I could set them up! But the age difference would make things weird, I guess.”

“Yes, Michelle’s getting close to 30 now.”

Klaus nods sagely. “And Five’s nearly 60; it would never work.”

Rachel looks alarmed, and Dave can’t blame her, but he’s starting to be used to it now. “Time travel?” Klaus hums the affirmative. Time travel seems to play an oversized role in Klaus’ odd life, but then it turns out to have been a pretty big part of Dave’s, as well. “What about Mariah, Rachel?”

“Oh, well.” The flush that comes to her cheeks gives away what she’s going to say before she says it. Klaus’ll probably be insufferable about it. 

“She’s the one with the good taste!” he crows. Dave called it. “No, please, do go on.”

“At first she never wanted to tell us.”

Klaus throws in, “Embarrassed of me. Typical.”

"No, it turned out it was because she couldn’t decide. Number Four or Number Three. She eventually figured out she liked both.”

For the first time since Rachel brought all of this up, Klaus’ compulsory smile softens into a real one. “We managed to do some good after all, then.”

Given the way Rachel has been gushing about their heroics, it’s clear she always believed they were doing good, despite Klaus’ more cynical view. There’s no heat in this last comment, though. Klaus is genuinely pleased to have somehow played a role in some kid’s queer awakening. Dave’s just glad that there is some part of this conversation, some part of his past as 00.04, that Klaus doesn’t have to plaster over with crafted flippancy.

“I wonder if this Mariah is still single. She’s got good taste and great genes.” Klaus gives Dave’s hand a squeeze. Neither of them are letting go. “She’s more my age than Old Man Dave over here.”

“Hey!” Dave protests.

“You were born like 50 years before me, dude.”

For all of Klaus’ goofing, Rachel still hasn’t lost the spark of wonder in her eyes at discovering this famous person at their dinner table. “I just can’t believe it’s you - that _you_ are Dave’s Klaus.”

He’s looking her way, so Dave can only see Klaus’ profile when he grins. Dave knows the expression, though. He has it memorized; it’s the most staggeringly bright and beautiful thing he’s ever seen. It’s Klaus lit up in love.

Klaus closes his eyes and shakes his head, chuckling. He’s put himself in their hot seat by being a big sap. Dave gives his hand a teasing little squeeze, but isn’t planning on dragging out self-conscious declarations of affection from him in front of the others.

Klaus turns his face to Dave and does it himself. “I can’t either.”

He disappears before dessert.

Dave’s family doesn’t take offense; they know it’s not rudeness. They’d gotten an explanation about how it could happen that way with Klaus only here temporarily. Still, Dave wishes the two of them could be normal, that they all could linger over coffee for the last hour of their evening, and then they’d stand in the doorway, his arm slung around Klaus’ waist, waving his family goodbye before they duck back inside together. One day. They’ll be together forever one day. 

That’s what Dave’s dad said, too, when they'd explained it. “You’ll get here eventually.”

Klaus scratched at his scalp. “That is how it usually goes,” he said, uncomfortably.

“And then it won’t be so easy to get out of doing the dishes,” his mom joked, and Klaus huffed out a laugh with the rest of them, and the conversation kept flowing on, but the ‘uncomfortably’ still sticks out in Dave’s memory.

Klaus is pretty nimble with his dodges, but Dave can see the dance for what it is. He recognizes the footwork from when Klaus had used it on him, back when they were first getting to know each other. In a way, it’s affirming to recognize how far they’ve come, how well Dave knows Klaus now and how much Klaus has let Dave in. It can’t get any brighter than bittersweet at its center, though, because it also lets him see just how easy and familiar it is for Klaus, how it comes as second-nature to hide the hurting parts of himself to keep the conversation smooth and relaxed for everyone else.

And it throws into sharp relief the weirdness of the ‘uncomfortably’ that Dave doesn’t have a frame of reference for. It’s not to do with his father or his unpleasant super-heroic childhood. It comes up around Klaus’ impermanence, and Dave can’t figure out _why._

He doesn’t have too long to dwell on it. He puts on another pot of coffee and tidies up, not that he really needs to in this place, but he likes for his hands to have something to do while his mind works. Klaus is back before Dave’s finished his fresh cup. 

It’s the fastest he’s been since that first night after the carnival. Dave wonders, not for the first time, but with a sharper interest, why it is that Klaus’ visits are so inconsistent.

“You really can be quick, when you want to be,” he says, making Klaus pause midway through the front door. He doesn’t knock.

“Bad, then.” Klaus says, his shoulders drooping.

“What?”

“The dinner. It went bad. I thought it might have, but I wasn’t sure how to read it all.” He pulls shut the door with a soft thump and leans back against it. “Shit. I’m sorry, Dave.”

“About what, exactly?” Dave hadn’t thought it was bad, actually, and didn’t think he was angry anymore anyway, but as the words come out, he realizes they are thorny and true. When his family was here and Klaus was squirming next to him, Dave’s love for him had papered over the hurt he felt about being kept in the dark, but it’s starting to poke through. “I think they were thoroughly charmed, that part went well. It’s only bad if it’s a problem that they know you better than I do.”

“Not better.” Klaus’ posture is split in two. He’s tipped forward, like he’s dying to close the space between them, but his feet won’t let him move. “Nobody knows me better than you. They know me different.”

“Because they could read all about it in a book you never even mentioned to me that came out decades after I died.”

“Yeah, well, that’s one of the reasons I never told you about it.”

There’s not a lot Dave can say to that. He’s being unreasonable. There’s something making the back of his head prickle, like the air itself is trying to pull him back to a happier mindset. Over here, that’s not really figurative. But it can’t fully work, not on him. Not with Klaus here. He rubs his hair, trying to make the feeling - either of them - go away.

“It’s not like it’s something I lead with.” Klaus finally crosses the room and perches on the couch next to him. “It’s not my favorite subject. And the people who would care, like your sister, they already know all about it.”

Miserably, Dave says, “I don’t, though. I don’t know about it.” It’s not supposed to be a way that Dave can say anything.

“You do know the important things, though.” Klaus says. He swallows. “You can read it. If you want to, you can read it, too.”

Dave does want to read it. Of course he does. He also wants Klaus to have said something else, but he’s not sure what. “You don’t want me to.” He intends it to be a question but he knows the answer.

“It’s only fair.”

That’s not how fair works. “There’s not a book you can read about me.”

“Not that you know of, anyway,” Klaus chuckles. “But I meant because everyone else gets to. It’s not about me though, exactly. It’s about my whole family, and I’m sort of the least of them. So be warned there are plenty of boring parts.” He shrugs, puts up a cocked grin. “Although maybe not, maybe you’ll find out your favorite Hargreeves is one of my siblings instead and have a great time.”

“You really think that could happen.” This was also meant to be less of a statement, but he can tell it’s partially true. Some part of Klaus believes that Dave could toss him aside as easy as that. It’s desperately sad and it makes Dave want to sweep him up in his arms with whispers and kisses until the doubt is obliterated from his mind. 

It also makes him want to shake Klaus by the shoulders a little bit, because it’s also exasperating. He really doesn’t want it to be, he really doesn’t want for ‘peeved’ to be a reaction he has to Klaus’ insecurities. But honestly, at this point, what more can Dave do? Dave’s love for Klaus is so consuming and strong and irrefutable that it’s bent the laws of the universe so that they can be here, together, decades after his death, in the afterlife, a place that mutes pain but can’t prevent Dave from pining and grieving and _loving_ this man. Is there anything more he can do to finally convince Klaus of what is so plainly true?

“Probably not,” Klaus says. “It’s kind of hard to fall in love with any of the people in that book.”

His curiosity is out of control. But this makes some sense. “So that’s why you don’t want me to read it.”

Klaus squirms. “It’s a little - it could seem a little - but you’ve got to understand, my sister wrote it when we were all 23, so just absolutely the worst versions of us we could ever be, and she had years of resentment and pain all built up inside her, so it’s kind of harsh, sometimes, in some ways. And that’s not how things are now, anyway, so when I talk about my family, it’s not the people you’ll read about in there.”

“It’s mean, huh?”

“It’s,” Klaus hedges, twisting his fingers, “uncharitable. Towards them. The past versions of them. I don’t want you to read it and think they’re like that.”

Dave doesn’t miss the particular phrasing. “It’s mean to _them_?”

“Not Five and Ben, since they were dead and gone, not in that order. But it turns out dying young has its perks. Lucky bastard.”

“I meant,” he sits straighter to watch Klaus’ face closely, “what about you?”

“Oh. Nah, it’s not mean if it’s true and she got me dead to rights.” Klaus grins. Dave hates it.

“I really want to read this book.”

“You can.”

“I won’t.”

“You _can_.”

“I know.”

He couldn’t do that to Klaus. He doesn’t think that the reasoning of ‘it seemed irrelevant to mention since it hadn’t been written yet’ is a lie, but he does think there could be more to it. It’s not hard to imagine that there must be a certain cachet in meeting someone who sees him as Klaus before Number Four.

“Tell me, then,” Dave says. “Tell me about your family. Who they are now. In your words.”

“Idiots,” Klaus snorts immediately. “Every last one of us. I think you’d like them, though.”

Klaus throws his arm up over the back of the couch cushions, settling in, and Dave follows suit, leaning sideways to rest his head on Klaus’ chest. He can feel the beating of Klaus’ heart. It’s such a terribly precious thing, and it’s also what’s keeping them apart. 

He listens to it, and to Klaus, telling Dave stories. About Vanya teaching Luther to play violin, and she’s tiny and he’s a giant and the violin looks like a child’s toy in his hands, but that he’s taking it pretty seriously and Klaus thinks it’s really good for both of them. He talks about how Five is an endless, begrudging, fascination of Claire, Klaus’ niece, because Klaus has a niece, too. He talks about how he’s managed to make Ben’s presence visible so consistently that Diego doesn’t jump out of his skin every time he sees him anymore. It warms Dave to hear the pleased smile in Klaus’ voice about that last one.

His eyes stay closed for longer and longer intervals, and he’s missing larger and larger chunks of the stories. Klaus strokes the short, fine hair just behind his ear.

He’s gone when Dave wakes up, slumped on the couch alone.

Dave spent a lot of his life scared. Longer than that, even. His year in Vietnam had been a master’s class in fear, but he’d been quite well-versed in the subject before that. He is intimately familiar with the unrelenting, overcast sense of unease that came from the constant, simmering secrecy of being quietly queer.

With his eyeliner and painted toenails and penchant for crop tops, Klaus had flounced into Dave’s life with the boldness of a person who had never known what it was like to be paralyzed with fear in that closet. Dave would have believed that ‘Confidence’ was Klaus’ middle name. 

Now he knows that Klaus probably doesn’t even have a middle name. 

And now he knows that Klaus is scared. It dawns on Dave like a drop of cream into a cup of coffee. It’s a distinct, spiraling thought that soon permeates his entire understanding. Klaus is scared. About something different, something that Dave doesn’t know the face of yet.

He knows about the nightmares, the broad strokes of a bad childhood and macabre specters. Those are outsized horrors. This is something else, something insidious and deep and perpetual. A daily companion. Dave can recognize it because he’s lived with such a thing, too.

With Dave’s awareness of this troubling new dimension, with Klaus readily admitting he’d keep hard truths a secret, with the swiss cheese understanding Dave has of Klaus’ life outside of their time together - Dave is more worried than he wants to be about what might be in that book.

He’s worried. Over here. Dave still has the capacity to be worried. Klaus hasn’t actually fixed that broken part of him.

And Dave is sure of it now - Klaus himself is worried, too. Or, weary, maybe. Like denim worn down from too many skinned knees, bleached fibers barely holding it all together.

He’s always been a contradictory sort of a person. Dave should have been able to see earlier how his easy flamboyance was a personality wrapped around a core of thrumming anxiety, since he’s been familiar with these intriguing notes of dissonance inside of Klaus for so long.

Klaus was at his sharpest when he got in country, and he was the only person Dave had ever seen get gentler the longer he spent there. Everyone had to find a way to cope with all the violence, all the fear, all the pointless destructive misery of war. He’d watched men grow aggressive and cruel, or ironic and detached, but there just wasn’t a way to treat death with the heartache it deserved and keep moving forward.

Except for with Klaus. He saw the humanity in everything. That wasn’t unusual over there - eyes being opened to the humanity of it all - but it generally went in the other direction. It was what destroyed people. It made Klaus softer.

There’d been a village girl, maybe six or seven years old, whose father had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was a fresh orphan, and she was wailing, and there wasn’t anything the soldiers could do to fix it. Until Klaus finally broke.

He’d pushed through the small crowd of tetchy GIs and knelt down beside her, and in halting murmurs, he spoke to her in her language. 

At first, she’d been shocked into quiet, and then overtaken by hiccups and weepy phrases, but the longer Klaus talked, the more she calmed. Most of it was unintelligible to the rest them, but sometimes he would say a few words in English, directed up and off to the side. “Slow down,” he’d say, or, “Hold on, can you say that part again?”

“Didn’t know you spoke Vietnamese, Hargreeves,” Polowski had said.

Klaus spared a glance up at the others to tell them, “I don’t.” After that they didn’t interrupt. The soldiers stood as outsiders bearing witness to this crying girl, Klaus’ split conversation, and the heavy chill creeping underneath their skin even in the humid air. It was after this day that Klaus would occasionally ‘pass on messages’ from their fallen brothers, and no one who had been there could fully discount them.

Klaus got more comfortable the longer he spent in a war zone, and now that he’s spending more time in a place that might be what people mean when they talk about ‘heaven,’ Klaus is getting more skittish and strained.

“Was it the apocalypse?” Dave asks one night, truly out of nowhere from Klaus’ perspective, Dave is sure. They are walking through the park, steps crunching the burnt orange leaves underfoot, the dark autumn-seeming air just frigid enough to make their breath visible.

The question breaks the silence between them. It hadn’t been an uncomfortable one, but while Klaus had spent it taking in the world around them, Dave had been watching the tungsten light from the street lamps curl around the harder lines of Klaus’ face.

“You’re sad,” Dave says, and it’s a simple sentence, but it feels like it takes a while. “Something’s different, and it seems worse lately, but you have been different ever since I’ve seen you over here. Something makes you sadder, now, between now and then. I’ve noticed but I can’t figure out why. I know you don’t like to talk about this sort of thing, but it’s just - That was _Vietnam_, and you seem sadder now, here, and I don’t know what I can do to help if I don’t know what happened.”

Klaus stops walking. “Dave,” he says. His eyes are full and searching, like they are staring into something unfathomably deep, but he’s just looking at Dave’s face. The sheer exposure of feeling on his face too immense and raw to be categorized into any easy particular emotion. It’s the same as that day, with that girl.

When they'd had to go their separate ways, the girl wrapped herself around Klaus’ legs with such force she nearly toppled him over. She waved at him as a woman led her back into the village, and he watched her with a face full of the same slew of emotions that are overflowing from him now. Sadness, fondness, acceptance, love and fear, vulnerability and fortitude - grief, might be the singular term. 

That’s the expression Klaus wears now as he says, “You _died,_ Dave.”

“Oh,” he says.

Oh.

“What happened is that I fell in love with you, and then you died, and I keep on living, but it felt - I really thought I would die from it, the way that I felt.” 

He’s hearing Klaus’ voice from a distance, hearing the sounds of it while the meaning of the words mist together. His mouth is soaked and tangy, and he thinks he might be sick.

Klaus smiles ruefully and hugs his chest. “That’s so stupid to say, now. But it just - ” He cuts himself off when he takes a better look at Dave. “Are you okay?”

“I’m dead,” Dave says. This isn’t news, this isn’t the first time he’s said it. Everyone here is dead. It’s just that he had forgotten that it means something to the people who are alive. He had forgotten the mourning of the living, and he had half-forgotten that Klaus is one of those still. Still alive, even over here. He’d forgotten Klaus doesn’t belong here. 

He remembers ‘leave me alone’ and he remembers the sputtering sounds of his death. The sounds that underscore the quiet that haunts Klaus over here. He did that - Dave did that to Klaus. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’re - what, for being dead? Hey, hey now, none of that.” Klaus takes hold of Dave’s elbows and gives them a gentle shake.

“I didn’t mean to - ”

“Get shot in the chest during the last month of your tour in the Vietnam War? Yeah, I figured that was on accident.”

“Klaus - ”

“Yeah, sorry.” He drops the attempted sardonic facade immediately. “Sorry. It’s not easy to - I’m sorry.”

That’s precisely the problem. It’s not easy. They love each other, they both do, so much, and Dave wants to believe that love makes life easy, but that’s not how it works. And even if there were an argument to be made for that, someone to submit a complaint to and insist that things be made better and that love make life easy, that still wouldn’t fix their problem. Because of Dave. Because death makes love hard.

Hard to satisfy, at least. Not hard to _do._ Dave loves Klaus, and that has always come terribly easily.

He tries to come up with the right words for all of this, to pack every bit of feeling into a succinct explanation for why he is being all of the ways he is being right now. There’s just so much, a lifetime and more of things both worldly and divine, to try to understand, much less communicate clearly. “Fuck,” he says.

Klaus mirrors Dave’s tired delivery. “Yeah.” Then he winces and grips his forearm. “Shit, sorry, I’m going back. I wish I could just _stay._ I - ”

He fades away before he can finish the thought. Dave walks home through newly falling snow and tries to imagine what he was about to say. 

Back in ‘Nam, they had spent not an insignificant amount of time quietly and futilely sketching out ‘when we get out of here’ aspirational futures. Small and wild hypotheticals of a remote cottage up on the northeast coast, a ranch neither of them would know the first thing about managing out west, a cramped and cozy apartment in the big city. Klaus even pitched Paris once, but at the time, Dave had been full up on foreign countries. He’s a creature of comfort. He’d wanted to be back home.

Sometimes they fall into the same game over here, although when Klaus describes something too outlandish to be believed, Dave now knows it’s not made up, it’s the future. He likes to hear about the future.

These conversations still feature that same mix of silly and serious, because their feelings are all so strong and all so real, but death remains in the way. It’s the other way around, though, biding time until a guaranteed happily ever after as opposed to a doomed scramble to reach a happy next year.

It should work like the vet meet-ups, where the inversion of tragedy washes everything in a sunny glow. Because it’s the basics. It’s rule number one. Everyone gets here eventually. Klaus and Dave’s story will sort itself out. Dave knows that. It’s literally their celestial destiny.

But Klaus - Klaus seems unconvinced. Dave himself wouldn’t have imagined coming to a place like this after he died, but Klaus comes here all the time, it shouldn’t be such a tough sell. It’s one thing to know something with your head, and another to believe it in your heart, though. 

Even Dave had spent time in his early days thinking there was something about himself that was too broken to be here. Klaus has lived a life defined by being the exception more than the rule, and Klaus has basically no self-worth. It breaks Dave’s heart that Klaus feels this way, and even though that’s not something that can get fixed in a day, they have literally forever to work on it, even if Klaus doesn’t think so. One day, he’ll find out.

Dave isn’t going to wait around for ‘one day.’ Overriding your stomach-churning anxiety to open up a vulnerable topic is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you don’t strictly have to. He knows this from recent experience, but he also knows that finally just plunging in is an incredible relief - even a bad resolution is easier to handle than sitting in everlasting what-ifs. So Dave’s going to do what he can to help, and plunge in.

He _means_ to plunge in. He thinks about it. Klaus is there the next day, and the next, and the next, and Dave really does mean to bring it up. It’s not the easiest conversation to start. He thinks maybe it’ll go better for both of them if they can multitask, so there can be something else to focus on if they need a break. It’ll be so rewarding, though, when it’s over and it’s the future and they’re looking back at it.

Time to plunge.

“Come on, get up,” he says, poking Klaus in the shoulder. Klaus seems to take this as a challenge to stay exactly where he is, and he cozies in closer. “Klaus,” Dave draws his name out in a long sing-song. The first time he heard Klaus do that to Dave’s name, he’d swooned so hard it almost made him mad, because he was already so far gone that there shouldn’t have been more to go. And yet. This a common ‘problem’ with Klaus, he’s since found. “Let’s get up and cook something.”

“Worked up an appetite, did you?” Klaus asks in his slinkiest voice. Dave just pokes his shoulder a few more times in response. “Don’t they have GrubHub over here?”

Still, Klaus gives in because of course he does. He’s not going to hold out on giving Dave something that will make him happy. Klaus himself says that the reason is much more strategic and much less sappy than that - he’s planning on getting some of Dave’s cookies out of the deal. “Is that what we’re making? Cookies? Sorry, is that what _you're_ making?”

“We,” Dave hands him the little tin box that holds his mom’s handwritten recipes, “are making whatever you pick. I’m going to teach you.”

“It’s your funeral. Oh wait, I guess you’ve already got that covered.” Klaus laughs at his own joke, but he sits at the table and obediently starts flicking through the options.

Dave pulls out baking staples he’s certain they’ll need. His nose is buried in the cabinet by the squat stove as he says, “You really will get here too, you know.”

“What is this, a recipe for pasta? You need written instructions on how to put water in a pot?” Klaus waves the index card in the air. “Sorry, hang on, what are you talking about?”

“I was just saying that bigots spend a lot of time trying to convince people that there all these rules about what you can and can’t do to make it to an afterlife like this, but everyone does come here.” He looks at Klaus meaningfully. “Everyone.”

“One would hope,” Klaus nods and keeps shuffling through the cards.

“No, really.” Dave is not letting this go that easily. “All of that bullshit about how being gay is a sin - it’s clearly just that. It’s bullshit.” He sets down the flour container a little harder and louder than he means to. It gets Klaus’ attention back on him as Dave sits down beside him. “I mean, gay sex is not keeping people out. We literally just had extremely gay sex over here. That’s not a problem.”

Klaus grins. “Not a problem at all.” It has the potential to be a very distracting grin, but this is important enough that Dave somehow dredges up the willpower to plow on.

“Your self-esteem is low, but seriously, ‘goodness’ has nothing to do with it. Coming here is just the next thing that happens after death, for everyone. And even it if was a test of goodness, you would still pass with flying colors.” He grips Klaus’ still fingers. “I just thought you might need to know that.”

Klaus swallows and smiles and says, “I’m not really laid low by the church or anything; I know that God doesn’t hate me because I’m a fag. This is all very sweet, though, peaches, thank you.”

“‘Sweet’ is not the right word. ‘Sweet’ is the word choice of a man who is not really listening to the wisdom of his elders,” Dave says, getting back to work pulling mixing bowls out of the cabinet. “And by that, I mean his smart, hot boyfriend who is sharing insights into the unknowable secrets of death.”

Klaus snorts. “‘Elder,’ huh?”

“I was born literally decades before you, you can’t just decide I’m ancient only when it suits your interests.”

“Ancient, wow, that does sound wise. Of course, you never even made it to 30, babe.” Klaus dramatically flicks a card in front of his face, then lowers it just enough to slide a sultry stare over the top of it. “And it’s not like death has any secrets from _me_.”

He’s hiding behind a recipe for eggplant parmigiana and bragging about seeing ghosts, and he still manages to pull off ‘alluring.’ It’d be annoying if it weren’t so hot. If those smoldering eyes weren’t all for Dave.

Dave has to shake his head a little to try and get it back. “In that case, you should know even better than me how it all works.” Klaus keeps his own head down, shuffling through the box, too fast to be reading any of them. “Is that silent agreement I’m hearing?”

“I - I don’t disagree.” Klaus hits the second negative hard. “That does seem to be how it works after you die. It’s just that I can’t seem to actually die.” He taps the cards back into a neat, orderly stack and starts going through them from the beginning again. He must have gone through it all so many times, at this point. Dave doesn’t know how many. “Not permanently. Not so it’ll stick. Ta da, superpowers. What a blessing.”

Dave’s first thought is that this is sublimely, tragically, cosmically unfair. They’ve been through so much, fought against the odds - traveled through time, fought in a war. They’ve already done enough, it’s not fair that their love be singled out, again, for eternity. 

His second thought is that they’ve already burned through their miracles. They managed to meet, fall in love, and find each other again here in the afterlife. It hurts that Klaus will never fully be here and they will always be kept apart, but they can make do, and being together like this is beautiful enough to be grateful for forever.

Dave’s third thought takes a bit to arrive. It trickles its way through the first rush of reactions like a stream through well-worn rocks. It’s about the implication baked into that statement. Klaus can’t seem to die so it’ll stick. That sounds like... “Trial and error?”

“You’re describing my whole life, baby!” His tone is light and playful, but Dave can hear the tiredness in it. That permeating quietness. 

“I’m talking about your _death._ Deaths? Multiple?” Dave was not raised as a childhood superhero. He’s having trouble wrapping his head around all of this. “You’re immortal?” 

“Functionally. I mean obviously I’m dead now, but I’ll just come back to life in a bit.”

“Obviously.” Obviously, Klaus is dead. Obviously?

“Well I’m here - the place people go after they die.” 

“You’re magic! You’ve got this death superpower!”

Klaus looks at him like he’s being very slow. “The power is the coming back to life thing.”

Klaus has been here more times than Dave can count, at this point. Klaus has been here every day this week. Klaus can be clumsy and careless, but Klaus didn’t just accidentally find himself in a dangerous situation every time he’s come here.

“But you’re dying first!” Dave doesn’t even realize that he’s close to yelling until after he yells. “You barely know how it works! What if you died and you didn’t go back?” 

_Come_ back. ‘Go back’ makes it sound like Klaus belongs here.

“The place I am literally dying to be? I think it’ll be fine!” Klaus isn’t quite yelling back, but his voice is raised and the teasing lilt is weighted to bruise.

“What about your brother?” Dave remembers how guilt-ridden Klaus felt about leaving Ben behind when they were in ‘Nam, and although Dave didn’t understand then how fully isolated Ben is without Klaus, he knows now that Ben’s alone really is entirely alone. 

Klaus at least looks a little contrite about that, but not enough for it to make a difference. He mutters, “I think it’ll be fine. You don’t need to worry about me wearing out my welcome here.”

Which is a low blow. Klaus knows that Dave could never get tired of being with him. He does know that, right?

“And I don’t understand what the big deal is anyway. It’s just my body,” Klaus says, “which might be the most marketable part of me, but sometimes I like to think it’s not actually the most valuable part. I thought you thought so, too.”

It gives Dave whiplash. He doesn’t think the first part is meant to hurt in the pinching way that it does, and he knows the second part isn’t supposed to piss him off. “Are you trying to take the moral high ground here? Against a guy who didn’t have to sneak into heaven.” It’s a harsher jab than he meant for it to be; it makes Klaus flinch and cover for it with a tight grin. It’s also not the main point so Dave stumbles quickly on. “And my side of the argument is that you shouldn’t _kill yourself._”

Klaus scoffs. “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

A clangor of incredulous noises sound off in Dave’s head, and clearly his face does a fine job conveying them, because Klaus goes on, “It doesn’t stick, so it barely even counts. It’s like a little body vacation. Everybody loves a vacation.”

Dave can’t believe he is having this argument. “It’s still _dying_.” 

He can remember dying, although he doesn’t like to. Dave knows he was shot, and he knows it was in his torso because he remembers that feeling spilling out from the center of him, feeling like everything and nothing at the same time. He’s not sure what it was exactly that killed him first, though. If it was the way the inside of him was pulled into the open, or if it was the emptiness of his chest after all his blood coursed out. He thinks it might have been from choking on it. 

That’s the last thing he remembers about being alive. He wishes it was something romantic, like Klaus’ beautiful face, or something peaceful, like a glimpse of pinprick stars, but all that was wiped away, eventually. The taste of blood, the sick dark scent of it, that’s what overtook him at the end. 

Dying is something Dave can speak with some authority on. “As I recall, it’s a pretty traumatic experience.”

“Not so much once you do it enough, and not when you set it up yourself,” Klaus says, because, of course, Dave is not as much as an authority as Klaus on it. No one is. “You can get it to be pretty painless, or at least fast.” 

Dave disagrees.

“So, you know, compared to the actual torture I had to go through before the first time I saw you, this is really nothing, not bad at all.”

“What,” Dave says.

Klaus’ eyes go wide, then he blinks in a choppy, quick rhythm. “Oh, right, I forgot I never told you about that.”

“About _what,_” Dave’s asking, but it’s already filling in. The way Klaus had shown up in a bloody towel, how he couldn’t walk straight for the first couple of days. Everything else about him had been so weird anyway that none of it had stood out in particular. Just Klaus being Klaus. 

And Klaus is still Klaus, he’s doing the same thing now. Downplaying and hiding the things that hurt him, putting out lots of energy to distract people from seeing it.

“It’s not like it matters,” Klaus says, and for a terrible flash of a distant moment, Dave wants to hit him for fucking saying that. Some part of that must show on his face, because Klaus shoots up out of the chair and quickly launches into some high-pitched babbling. “I just mean that it happened, but it’s the past; it’s not like you can do anything to change that, so there’s no point in dwelling -”

Dave doesn’t want to be mad, hates that he’s mad right now. But it just erupts. He’s livid. “You _literally_ had a _time-traveling_ machine! If anyone could change the past - ”

“I didn’t know how it worked! Also, I don’t think that is how it worked. And, honestly,” Klaus shrugs, “if I had a time machine to change something from my life, that wouldn’t even rank top five on the list. I would be much better served stopping, god, any of those times when I was a kid, maybe I’d be less of a complete screw-up. But I wouldn’t have met you, and that’s not even worth considering, and then there’s the paradox of using a time machine to prevent yourself from finding a time machine. Just doesn’t work.”

Dave is stuck a sentence or two back.

Any of those times when he was a kid. 

Times. Multiple. 

Multiple times, being tortured, in his lifetime. Multiple times as a _child._

Dave interrupts him. “Klaus. Stop.” He does, all of him, shuts up and pauses his endless, purposefully distracted rearranging of the fruit bowl at the center of the little breakfast table. “As a kid? What are you saying?”

He’s too deep into himself to hear his voice, but something about his tone makes Klaus bristle. “I did always tell you my dad was a jerkass,” he says defensively, as though the telling is what Dave has a problem with right now. 

His dad. 

“I guess I didn’t need to say all that, huh?” Klaus laughs, but not truly. He laughs the way he laughs when he’s trying to convince both of them that what he’s saying is funny. “Maybe all this head trauma I’m racking up is a bad idea after all.” He winces. At least he’s starting to realize the stuff he’s saying is worth wincing at. “Shit. Or that. I’m sorry.”

Dave loses it. He can barely see from it. The world over here is trying to pull it back in, back to something soft and quiet and sweet, but his heart is none of those thing right now. There’s a tug-of-war between his rage and this place, and it’s rending him in half. “You are apologizing to me now?”

“Um. No?” Klaus backs an unconscious step away. His eyes are big and fixed and unsure, the eyes of a wounded animal. Dave’s far from the first person to make them look like that, but he’s the one doing it right now. He doesn’t want to be, he hates that he is. He’s so angry, looking at those eyes.

“You are apologizing to me,” Dave seethes, “for having been tortured as a kid?”

“Well technically, ‘experimental training.’ You know me, I’m dramatic, I embellish things.”

He doesn’t. Klaus is the opposite of dramatic, actually, when it’s about the things that matter.

Dave holds his head, trying to keep it together. He’s getting ripped apart. This shouldn’t be possible here, and that makes it worse.

Tentatively, Klaus puts his hand out and takes a small step closer. “Fuck,” he says. “Dave.”

He wants Dave to let it go. Just like this place does. To just go with it, like he did when he was alive, to decide it’s not important, like everyone does with Klaus. To treat it like it’s trivial, the same way that Klaus treats what is his apparently habitual suicide. Because Klaus has spent too long tangled up with death, so long that life doesn’t matter to him. Klaus doesn’t think that his life matters.

It fucking matters to Dave.

“You can’t keep doing this.” It comes out garbled and waterlogged from someplace deep in Dave’s chest. “You get that, right? I don’t want to see you like this.”

“Yeah,” Klaus says. “Okay, yeah.” He pulls in a sharp inhale, like he’s about to say something more, but he doesn’t. 

The room stretching out between them is wavering, heat haze on the highway, or maybe that’s just how Dave feels.

“Right. Sorry. I mean - I’m not apologizing, I’m - ” Klaus is shaking his head and Dave realizes that Klaus does not understand the issue here at all. He yanks open the door that leads to the backyard. “Sorry,” he says one last time, and steps through.

There’s more to say, there’s always more to say, and Dave wants to make sure Klaus gets it, so he lurches into motion but by the time he reaches the door, it’s too late and the yard is as bright and as sunny and as empty as it was the first day Dave got here. Dave isn’t dreaming, he’s dead, and Klaus isn’t ever going to belong here with him.

The picket fence rings him in like a trap, and Dave hurtles through the gate because he can’t stand staying inside by himself, and he walks and he walks and he walks and he doesn’t turn left and he doesn’t come home because that doesn’t feel like the right word for it at the moment and he doesn’t think he can be in that kitchen without seeing the ghost of that frightened face, or worse, in his bedroom without seeing that sleepy, satisfied face, or anywhere seeing anything. Klaus’ face is part of every place Dave goes, because he’s part of Dave. Which means he might as well go home and sleep.

He doesn’t see Klaus. It’s weeks, a month; he doesn’t see Klaus.

‘This is what you wanted,’ a snide voice in his head tells him. ‘You got what you wished for.’ It’s true, even in a not-so-snide way. Genuinely. Dave wants Klaus to take care of himself and stay alive. He wishes for Klaus to want that, too, but he’s not so certain that’s what’s happening. He can’t be certain, not without seeing him, but Klaus doesn’t want him over there and Dave doesn’t want Klaus over here. But not in the way that it sounds.  
Dave misses him.

He’s conscious of how much time is passing, in a way that he hasn’t been for a while. It’s fucked up. He’s not over here wishing for Klaus to die. He just misses him.

Ta da, what a super power Klaus has. 

There isn’t a way to stop missing him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know!! I know I said it's angst with a happy ending and it _is_, but this isn't the real ending, that's tomorrow, so! I'm sorry. Sort of sorry. :)
> 
> Thank you to everyone who responded to this story! It's so exciting to know when folks like it and to hear reactions when I've spent so long only with myself having read it. I'll have the next chapter up tomorrow, but for now here's a little snippet:
> 
> _The last month of his tour, the shape of his future had such a push and pull about it. The more hopeful he got that the two of them would last, the more certain he was that they wouldn’t. He’d been too scared to believe in the permanence of good things._  
_Nowadays, he asks himself that’s still true. He pats down the damp soil in his garden and wonders if the stupid random hurtful chance of his death is proof that his fear was justified._


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last month of his tour, the shape of his future had such a push and pull about it. The more hopeful he got that the two of them would last, the more certain he was that they wouldn’t. He’d been too scared to believe in the permanence of good things.
> 
> Nowadays, he asks himself that’s still true. He pats down the damp soil in his garden and wonders if the stupid random hurtful chance of his death is proof that his fear was justified.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (added a tag for some intense violence in this chapter!)

_“Klaus was so sweet and vulnerable as a boy, but Father experimented on him the most, and it changed him.”_

Dave reads the book.

He knows he’d said he wouldn’t, but that was a long time ago, when they were together, and Klaus and Dave are now, decidedly, not together. As not together as two people can be. 

They will be not together for literally all time, but Dave is trying not to dwell. He can’t make it through eternity without breaking a couple of promises, so for now he’s starting small and reading the book instead of sprinting through that portal to crash in, uninvited, on his boyfriend’s life. 

(Ex-boyfriend.)

It seems like the smaller thing, anyway, until Dave cracks the book open. It’s immediately so scathing a read that it feels invasive. He can’t put it down, though. 

_“Everything was a joke to Klaus. That’s fun at first, but what he apparently never learned is that nobody likes to be laughed at. With him laughing at everything and everyone, it wasn’t too long before nobody liked him, either.”_

He imagines it’s sections like this that make Rachel nervous. 

She had come by not too long after their dinner, that first and only visit she got to share with the love of Dave’s life. That’s a phrase Dave resents, these days. So limiting. If anyone cares, he’d like to make it clear that he’s happy to pass on the love of his life part if it would help him secure a love that lasts after that.

Anyway.

Rachel came by saying that she had read the book. “And, just, well,” she’d said, “have you read it? Are you going to?” He’d shook his head, and she’d hummed like she had more to say, but she wouldn’t tell him what was on her mind. 

Dave would guess now that she was worried about the character of the Klaus that she found between those pages, but he thinks that automatically agreeing with Vanya’s diagnosis is a fairly shallow interpretation of the text. It feels to Dave like she’s always just missing the point; she draws her conclusions slightly to the left. Vanya’s only insightful on accident.

There’s this story about Klaus being the one to teach all the rest of them to swear because he grew a foul mouth so early on. It’s presented as a funny anecdote, and it is a kind of funny picture: an opulent dining room that was usually silent but for the scraping of silverware, exploding into sound as a six-year-old hurls a string of vicious obscenities at their increasingly red-faced father, the room only going quiet again when he is pulled away from the table and brought outside. Funny on the surface only, classic Klaus, because there’s no humorous answer that Dave can find for where he learned those phrases, or how he knew to use them properly, filled with anger in the way an adult would curse. And what did his father do to make Klaus so spitting mad? It’s not really a funny story at all.

_“Learning to play the violin taught me more than finger positions and scales. Putting in hours upon hours of practice made me realize that people spend the most time with the things that they love the most. Klaus always liked to complain about Father and would zealously pontificate about how he didn’t love any of us, but Klaus always got the longest training sessions with him. His disaffected, wounded persona always felt hollow to me after I realized that.” _

The whole book is stunningly void of empathy; there’s no effort to put herself in her siblings’ patent leather shoes. Considering how much time she clearly has spent obsessing about their lives, it’s a glaring omission. Dave doesn't know anything about book publishing, but he wonders about the editors who didn’t point this stuff out to her. Maybe they knew that the more clearly flawed her perspective was, the more sensational the larger story would be around the memoir. Exploiting every dollar from any angle, even ones that were unflattering to their mysterious pseudo-celebrity author.

It’s so obvious in her violin metaphor. She compares her relationship with her violin to Reginald’s relationship with her brother, but she doesn’t follow the thought through far enough to reach its full implications: Klaus functions as the instrument that is picked up and played by his father whenever the man wants to use him. Is this really the treatment that she has always dreamed of?

So it’s a terribly uneven read. One chapter she’ll be complaining about being excluded from the superhero lifestyle, and the next she’ll be describing Ben’s painful death, without ever connecting the two thoughts into a balanced perspective. She mentions, in that Ben chapter, about how Klaus lied to them all, pulling a terribly cruel prank by telling them that he could see their brother’s ghost when he couldn’t. Since Dave knows that Klaus most definitely can see Ben’s spirit and has for a very long time, he wonders which anecdotes about the others are unreliable.

He doesn’t think she’s lying, not on purpose, but as she repeatedly mentions, she had what was in many ways an outsider’s view. There has got to be so much that this ‘tell-all’ is missing.

_“A stranger looking in past the iron gate might have imagined that life behind the frosted glass doors of the Hargreeves Mansion was one of luxury. We certainly never had to worry about when our next meal was coming - dinner was always precisely on the dot. However, every strenuously scheduled day was packed with rigorous training. Turning a child into a superhero is not an easy task, even for our father’s world-renowned genius, and certainly not for us. Our days were full of tutoring and drills, and my siblings had individualized training with Father, the lessons from which they all dealt with on their own, in their own quiet ways._

_“Except for Klaus, of course. Klaus always did feel the need to be the exception, in everything. Our bedtime, like the rest of our regimented lives, was strict, and all the rooms in our hall were to be dark and silent at 9:30 p.m. sharp. You wouldn’t hear a peep from Luther, or Diego; Klaus was the only one to carry on at all hours of the night. The real superheroes couldn’t be deprived of their rest, so I was the lucky one who got the bedroom next to his. At all hours, he’d whimper and whine; he’d have full-blown conversations with nobody - sometimes he’d even go into screaming fits at midnight. The soundproofing Father put in helped, and shortly after we reached the double digits, Klaus found his own chemical methods to soundproof himself.” _

This is the kind of thing that has Dave wanting to tear his hair out. She writes at a different point that, “Klaus would do anything to suck attention his way, even when he rarely had anything to say that was worth all the fuss.” He rants at the book, out loud, alone in his house on the other side of death, as though if his voice gets loud enough, it will reach the ears of the Hargreeves siblings from over a decade ago.

“He had plenty of important things to say!” he shouts. “He just didn’t tell any of you, because when it’s about something that actually matters, he keeps quiet. Because with nobody ever caring enough to listen, he grew up learning that his problems weren’t worth mentioning! How could he think anything else when the reaction to him getting worked up into screaming panics in the middle of the night was for everyone to roll their eyes and consider putting up some insulation as the fix for the real problem?”

He reminds himself that they were kids. That they were not only kids, but kids raised without anyone teaching them about what ‘normal’ looked like. Kids raised without any idea of what being loved felt like. He calms down and goes to pour himself a glass of water and before he’s even had his first sip, he starts raving again. 

“You know it’s not a good sign if a person who has been crying out for help suddenly goes silent, right? That’s a warning sign - that’s not something to be grateful for!” His fingers are ripping at his scalp. “He can see _ghosts,_ for pete’s sake. You all _knew_ that his superpower was literally that he was haunted. How could you just assume that he was being a whiny brat making up stories?”

The answer, of course, is Sir Reginald Hargreeves. Dave had heard plenty of stories about him before, but even if he didn’t have access to Klaus’ added perspective, it comes through clearly enough in the text. Reginald was an even bigger piece of shit father than Dave had thought. Uncomfortably, he realizes that maybe that’s evidence that Dave himself had gotten used to downplaying the things that Klaus would say.

_“When Klaus turned himself into such a mess that he was quietly expelled from The Academy, left behind from missions to wallow in his own shortcomings, he turned to me, as though I was so desperate for a friend that I would gratefully accept his overtures of kinship. As though being born nothing was the same thing as choosing to become that way. If I had a power, if I could be out there with my siblings, I would have been, trying to make the world a better and safer place. I would never have thrown it all away, but Klaus always did manage to be self-centered to an unfathomable degree.”_

There is a certain way Klaus will frame things, sometimes - a way he frames himself. This particular, self-deprecating turn of phrase, ‘bad investment.’ Before, Dave could believe it was an expression Klaus invented, or later, that it was a phrase that all the kids were using in the new millennia. But it’s heavily implied in the book that the some of the Hargreeves kids weren’t properly adopted so much as bought, and Dave starts to think maybe this is a term Klaus was taught.

In Reginald’s nasty, cost-benefit, dehumanizing equation of value, power equals worth, and his belief system was formative for the minds of his children, just like any other parent. More than the average parent, probably, since he kept them locked away in that house for so long. His views were the only ones they got to hear for years. However much Vanya was excluded from certain aspects of Academy life, it’s clear that she was taught to think this way, too.

She turns it on herself, believes herself to be fundamentally worthless because she was born without a superpower, or so she thought back when she wrote it. Dave knows that Klaus subscribes to the same theory as his siblings. It’s why he values himself so little. Power is only as useful as the person wielding it, and useless powers are still useless.

Dave starts to feel that by forbidding Klaus to use his powers to visit him on this side, Dave is carving deeper tracts into the most scarring lesson about himself that Klaus has yet to unlearn. Or maybe it's the other way around, and letting Klaus kill himself to use his powers is reinforcing the idea that he’s only worth something if he uses his powers, whatever the cost.

And of course it’s demeaning to think that Dave can or should ‘forbid’ Klaus from doing anything; Klaus is an adult fully responsible for making his own decisions. But it’s willfully ignorant to think that Dave’s wishes don’t have an impact on Klaus’ choices. And it’s not like it matters, it’s not like if Dave decides now that he should make different choices, they’ll have any effect on Klaus, who is all the way on the other side of death and specifically not talking to Dave anymore. Because that’s what Dave asked him to do. Told him to do.

Back and forth. Around in circles. He can’t find good answers for any of it.

One thing he can actually do is talk to Rachel about the stuff he yells about. He needs her lasting impression of Klaus not to be what she read in that damn book. He can’t stand the idea of her thinking Klaus is actually like that.

Turns out, she doesn’t think he is. She came over asking before because, “I wanted to apologize. I didn’t know what I was talking about, when I brought up all that stuff at the dinner.”

“I didn’t know about it,” Dave says, because that’s been a primary theme in his shouting marathons.

“That was clear,” Rachel says. “But you’ve read it now?”

He nods. “Rachel, he was killing himself to get over here.” She makes a sympathetic face, which is too mild a reaction for her to understand just how literal he is being. “He comes back to life, but he was dying every time I ever saw him here. He killed himself, over and over. He didn’t think there was a _problem_ with that.”

The line between her eyebrows is appropriately deep and sad, a metric that exists because apparently Dave’s goal here is to pervade his sister’s paradise with misery, too. What a paragon of goodness he is. He deserves every bit of his high horse, obviously.

“Past tense,” Rachel notes. “So now he knows there’s a problem, or now he’s not going to come over here anymore?” Optimistically, she adds, “Or maybe both?”

“I think he’s just not coming. I don’t think he really got why I was mad.” Picking at the ridged fabric of his armchair is a great way to avoid eye contact.

“I guess I won’t be apologizing to him anytime soon, then. Unless,” she perks up, “well, he can talk to the dead, so why don’t you just go over there and - ”

“He thinks I might get stuck.” Back when they’d first discussed all of that, it had seemed like a bit of an unfounded concern, since Dave’s trip back to Vietnam had gone fine. Well, not fine, but not for the reasons Klaus was worried about. Crucially, it hadn’t seemed like it even mattered, because this way was working, wasn’t it, and why fix what’s not broken? All that time Dave had spent, at Klaus’ expense, not knowing how badly things were broken. “He’s not very good at controlling his powers and he thinks they might be like a magnet I can’t pull away from to come back here to you guys. So I guess if someday you just never hear from me again, you’ll know why.”

“Oh, Dave,” she says, her a voice honeyed with maximum sympathy, and a hint of the suggestion that she always knew better. She’s really good at it. She’s had plenty of practice as both a mother and a grandmother, and she’s been a big sister since Dave was born.

“So what is it?” he asks. “You think you know something I don’t. You always knew he was bad news or something? What?”

“No, honey. I really like him. I don’t think he’s a bad guy.”

There’s a ‘but’ coming. She’s too adult to say it out loud, but it’s coming. He raises his eyebrows at her. “Let’s hear it.”

She frowns, and sighs, and leans across the space between them to pat his knee. “He had a hard childhood. He’s had an entire hard life. Growing up like that can leave a person with a few problems, and not necessarily ones that are easy to fix. Or possible to fix.”

“How is that his fault?” Dave demands. How ridiculously, stupidly unfair, to throw out an entire, wonderful person, because some parts of their past hurt them. It’s the opposite of what you should do to a person who has been hurt before.

“It’s not about that.” Rachel sits back. “You’re a fixer, Dave. You’re a guy who’ll work your heart ’til it breaks over the things you can’t fix.”

He hadn’t thought of himself that way before. He’s not sure if he agrees that it’s true, but he says desperately, “But why can’t I fix it? That’s so dumb; I want to fix it.” So maybe he proves her point.

“I know, honey.” Seventy years of love and loss shine from her eyes. “People don’t really work like that.”

There was a guy Dave knew in high school, Ray, an artsy writer kind of guy with dark eyes and a dark smile. They had chemistry together, and neither of them were very good at science, but that didn’t really matter. Dave didn’t want to talk to him because he wanted pointers on balancing equations.

A faded blue poster on the classroom wall had this phrase on it, something about making a happy discovery everyday, and Dave finally broke the ice by asking Ray what his happy discovery was today and hooked his thumb over at the poster. Ray rolled his eyes, but after that, they had a conversation full of sarcasm and complaints every day.

He used it in ‘Nam as an icebreaker with Klaus, and it became a thing they did, too, asking each other for their day’s happy discovery, but with Klaus, it wasn’t always sarcastic. Later on in his tour, Klaus answered it genuinely more often than not.

He’d look up and point out the visible shafts of dusty sun piercing through the canopy, or the comfortable cadence of the chatter of women in the rice paddies as they trekked past. Once, he scrutinized Dave’s face for nearly a full minute, long enough to make him hot under the collar, until finally he reached out softly and picked, “This freckle. Right here.”

One day they were taking a long afternoon break, long enough that the unit ended up just making camp there for the night. It was humid, the ground visibly steaming after the recent downpour. Klaus had grabbed Dave’s hand and pulled him away from the others to fool around. Dave had put up a cursory fight, for appearances.

“If we’re not careful,” he panted, “we could be Rapp’s happy discovery for the day.” And then he’d taken the lead, ever so carefully pinning Klaus bodily to a tree.

He’d figured the talking part of their exchange was done, and was intent on leaving a mark where Klaus’ loose hanging shirt left the curve of his collarbone bare. But Klaus eventually managed to say, “No, that one’s mine. He can’t have my happy discovery.”

“Oh, did you not notice,” Dave said, pressing wet kisses along Klaus’ neck, “that I’ve been doing this? Do you need some more help making this discovery?” He wedged his thigh farther between Klaus’ legs.

It made Klaus gasp out a little laugh, but then the fingers that were tangled in Dave’s hair tugged gently. Dave pulled back to look into those clear, wide eyes, more brilliantly green than the jungle that enveloped them. 

“We,” Klaus said. “That’s my discovery. We are an us. You and me.” It clearly meant a lot to him, even if Dave didn’t entirely follow. He let him keep going. He would always let Klaus keep going. “I never thought this could happen. But here you are, and I’m right here with you. We’re an us. That’s it for me. I’m done for. We are it for me, now, forever.”

Klaus’ forever had turned out to be less literal than Dave’s. He’d only had about a month left, then. With an end to his tour in sight, Dave was starting to fixate more and more on endless, agonizing, ultimately pointless worries about what would become of them. If they didn’t make it out. If they did. “If we’re lucky enough.”

“But that’s the thing, isn’t it!” Klaus exclaimed. “I’d never have thought I’d be here. It’s impossible, but here we are together, both of us. I love you, and you love me, and it’s real and we are real. I never ever thought something like us could happen. I could never see us coming.”

“Well then, darlin’.” Dave slid his hands down Klaus’ sides until his fingertips just barely brushed against the waistband of his pants. “Keep your eyes open,” Dave tells him.

That last month, he’d worried a lot about making it home. A lot of the guys about to ship out did. Of course, there wasn’t actually anything about the odds that made it more likely for a guy to bite it at the end of his tour. It’s all stupid, random chance. He knew that. But still. He got real panicky. He’d jump awake in the night even more often than he usually did. 

The shape of his future had such a push and pull about it. The more hopeful he got that they’d last, the more certain he was that they wouldn’t. He’d been too scared to believe in the permanence of good things.

Nowadays, as he plants heliotropes and vibrant orange zinnias in his broken paradise, he asks himself that’s still true. He pats down the damp soil and wonders if the stupid random hurtful chance of his death is proof that his fear was justified.

That last month, Klaus only kept growing more hopeful and more certain. “Didn’t they have sappy movies about the power of love and all that in the fifties?” he’d chirped, positively gleeful. “You ever heard that ‘true love conquers all?’”

“Can’t conquer a land mine.”

Klaus had grinned. “There’s life after death, babe, I can assure you.” His gaze out into the distance went hazy with happiness, and he went on, dreamily, “Not that that’s going to matter. We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to make it, and we’re going to travel around the world shoving pastries into our faces until we get too old and tired for that, and then we’ll get ourselves a ranch somewhere upstate to settle down, and when we're sixty we’ll adopt six ridiculous kids."

“So not a quiet old age of peaceful tranquility, then,” Dave had joked. “Six of them?”

“The kids are going to be _great._ And non-negotiable.”

It was a daydream tinged with melancholy, because back then, Dave didn’t imagine there could ever be a world where two men could adopt children. But Klaus was so sure about it, just like he was about the everlasting endurance of their love. Klaus was not going to let anything as paltry as death get between them. He would do whatever he could. 

And he did. Klaus did more than he should, trying to keep them together. Maybe that’s what Rachel would deem one of his unfixable problems. Unequivocally, Rachel has more experience with this kind of thing; she’s known a lot more people than Dave has. But there are certain people that Dave knows _better._

He’s undecided on that question of whether the universe is a fundamentally optimistic or pessimistic place. Probably, the answer is unknowable. Or it’s some ineffable combination of the two. What he can decide is that it doesn’t matter. The only thing he can know for certain is himself, and what he chooses to do. That’s what determines his personal universe.

It’s time he try to pull his weight. He knows Klaus doesn’t want him to, but Dave can’t just do nothing.

Vanya hadn’t had access to photographs, for obvious ‘unofficial exposé’ kinds of reasons, but she’d captured the harsh austerity of this place, the way that the warm colors and plush fabrics had calcified into something hard and cold. Dave doesn’t think pictures printed on the thin, flat pages of a book would be able to capture the scale of it anyway. It’s big and empty and dreadful. The house 00.04 grew up in.

He’s reminded by the tugging in his gut that the point of coming here wasn’t to snoop around like a nosy tourist. It’d be flattering to think the sensation was meant for him, specifically, a sign that Klaus wants him here, but from what Dave understands of Klaus’ powers, he figures any ghosts who get near enough feel that pull. Klaus is, however unwillingly, a true magnetic force.

Even if he didn’t have this tether to follow, Dave probably would have picked this direction anyway. From deeper into the house come shouts and banging and noises Dave doesn’t quite know how to describe. In combination, it’s the sounds of a fight.

Out in the courtyard. Because of course this giant house has a giant courtyard.

The pull gets stronger the closer he gets to the action, and Dave has time to worry that maybe this is the whirlpool riptide of Klaus’ powers, that maybe this is the gravity that keeps his brother Ben tied to him and it’ll keep Dave trapped here, too. His reaction is one that he’s self-aware enough to recognize, from the last time he and Klaus were together. It’s a guilty fear - fear that he might be stuck separated from his family, and guilt that part of him is ready to accept that as a trade-off for the company of his favorite person. But that last time, he’d been the one horrified with Klaus for feeling this way. The hypocrisy of them both.

The courtyard is even more massive than Dave expected, although that’s in part because of the swirling dimensional portal on the far end. It’s like Rachel had explained to him once, about mirrors making a room look twice as big, he thinks dimly. It’s not reflecting back the normal world, the trees and the gazebo and the turbulent sky. It is a gaping hole to somewhere almost exclusively made up of what can be best be described as dark purple splotches, underlined by shadows that aren’t dark.

The other centerpiece of whimsical decor is a metallic creature, approximately the size of Dave’s heavenly cottage. Its many shiny limbs are whipping through shredded air and slashing at the group of people spread out around it. They are dwarfed next to the thing, although two of them are objectively tiny and one is much bigger than a person ought to be.

This is them, he thinks. The Umbrella Academy. This is the kind of stuff that was going on in the weird world after he left it. This was a huge deal until it wasn’t anymore because the world got bored. It’s still a huge deal to this family, who is still having to deal with it, and has been since they were children. Fighting iron tentacle monsters from another dimension is a typical Tuesday. This is their life. 

They even have their own tentacle monster, he remembers, as he watches what must be one of Ben’s extra appendages catch hold of one of the artificial limbs just before the mechanical claw at its end can snatch the feet of a tall woman. She leaps back, farther away from their grasping reach. The creature screeches out, a teeth-scraping cry of grating metal, and then the sound pulls away, like it’s been boxed up. On the far side of the robot, a short woman glows white and her hair streams behind her, a frayed, dark banner in the sudden wind.

Dave’s mouth hangs open. He cannot comprehend how the world lost interest in this. But then, he himself is determined to look away from all the flash. Ben is here and that means - 

Klaus is here. He’s hanging back, watching the fight intently but not wading in himself. Not physically, but Dave knows he’s the one powering Ben’s very corporeal contributions. He is laughing, like he’s amused and shocked by this whole thing too, dodging out of the way of an airborne bench that splinters into projectile shards when it hits the ground.

A little kid appears on the wide back of the lumbering thing, which seems like a tactically advantageous position, but Dave doesn’t understand what kind of damage he could possibly do. In a burst of light that reminds Dave of Klaus’ arrival in country, the boy zaps away and Dave figures he made the same calculations Dave did, until the explosion sends a shockwave through the courtyard.

It’s all such a spectacle, almost like there should be cotton candy vendors and upbeat music scoring this circus act. Of course, it isn't a show, and the tide turns. 

The glowing one - Vanya, he’s pretty sure - gets smacked out of the air and the creature roars at full, shuddering volume. The man who must be Diego jumps to her defense, so it can’t carry on hurting her while she’s down. Luther helps, too; he’s even larger than Dave had been able to imagine when Klaus explained about how his big brother was truly _big._ He’s strong enough to hold one greedily snapping hook in place. But it has an awful lot of those segmented limbs flailing around, and a lot of other people they could target. Dave steps forward, wanting to help, but his time spent as a soldier can’t help unless he’s solider.

He can’t say for certain which comes first - Klaus turns his head in Dave’s direction just as Dave says his name. It doesn’t take more than a glance. First his eyes, then his entire self snags on Dave’s presence. It’s like a scene from a film, the lights gone down everywhere else but on the two of them, moving in slow motion, the rest of the world spinning by outside of their suspended moment.

None of that’s true. They aren’t insulated against outside forces just because they are ignoring them. Klaus doesn’t get enough time to settle his expression into one recognizable emotion; he’s half shaking his head and half smiling when he is lifted off his feet. The grip of the metal coiled around his neck squeezes that all off of his face. If anything, Klaus looks resigned when his fingers slide off the tightening cable and his toes scuffle uselessly trying to reach the ground.

Dave shouts, but the only one who can hear him is Klaus, whose hands begin to glow blue. Dave is split by warring sensations. Something’s trying to tug him away so that he won’t see what happens next, but he needs to see it because it needs to turn out just fine.

The thing does let Klaus go. It raises him up higher to smash his body down, with such force that his head bounces back up and cracks twice on the weathered stone.

Dave’s at his side in an instant. Klaus looks up at him, bleary and sad and wounded. Dave has seen too many comparisons for this scenario already.

Feebly, like he’s trying his best not to move it, Klaus shakes his head. “You shouldn’t - ” he says, and then he screams, because a claw closes into a sharp, wide point and stabs through his body and into the ground. Dave _feels_ the sound as a cutting agony inside his own incorporeal torso.

Klaus doesn’t make a noise when, still buried in him, the claw’s three fingers open up, or when the thing rips back out, flicking blood and viscera onto his face as it zooms away to try and ruin one of his siblings. The light in his hands cuts out. Across the courtyard, Ben goes insubstantial and the three metal limbs his tentacles were holding back go free.

“Ben!” one of the others shouts. Another, “Klaus!” 

Klaus is blinking up at the overcast sky, his mouth is gaping as blood bubbles up to paint his lips dark red. The bruised pink muscles in his neck jump sporadically as he strains to take in a breath. He screws his eyes shut and balls his fists tight, coaxing them back to their brilliant blue. 

With an unearthly howl, Ben pops back into the physical world and rips into the creature with renewed viciousness. He tears one robot arm off at the base and throws it across the yard. The siblings hoot his name in a triumphant chorus.

Klaus tries to lift a hand to the absolute mess that is his chest, and Dave is trying his best to do the same, but his hands just pass cleanly through, and Klaus keeps running out of energy and his heavy wrists keep plummeting back to the wet pavement, and it doesn’t matter anyway because anything either of them could do to put pressure on this shattered, grisly hole would just be a different hurt, a palm trying to dam a river. Klaus tries to raise his leadened head to look at the damage, but his inability on this front is at least a mercy. He can’t see the devastation, his pulsing insides, his ribs turned out the wrong way.

In all of his imaginings of coming to see him over here, in spite of Klaus’ concerns, Dave’s consoling thought was that it really couldn’t turn out worse than the time in ‘Nam. It should be impossible that this is happening. It is apparently just not quite impossible enough.

The tears slipping off Dave’s face disappear, because he’s not real, not here. His hands go to cradle Klaus’ head, to provide some sort of comfort in this sea of hurt, but he can’t. He can’t do anything about this. 

‘You’re a fixer,’ Rachel had said. And damned if she wasn’t right, about that and about how he is categorically unable to do anything to fix the problems that are plaguing Klaus.

His eyes are wide open, but he’s unseeing. Dave has been saying his name, over and over, without meaning to, but Klaus doesn’t seem to hear him, either. Hopefully this loss of senses includes all of them, and it’s not just that feeling is so strong that it’s blotting out the rest.

Then, Dave can feel, he can feel the clotted strands of hair he’s brushing away from Klaus’ pale face. For only a quick spark of a moment, and then his fingers sink through Klaus’ skull as the life fades from his eyes and the light fades from his hands.

The world’s gone quiet, again. It’s just the two of them. Except there’s still a superhero battle clamoring over his shoulder, and they aren’t alone _together._ Dave is just alone.

Although, no, he’s not. 

“Hey!” He’s been blurring the din into one big hazy fog, so he doesn’t realize at first that this is directed at him. “Hey! What are you doing?” 

It’s Ben, back in whatever level of reality ghosts inhabit on earth. His tone is accusatory, and he just tore up a giant robot with his own bare tentacles, but even if all this wasn’t the case, Dave would not want his first interaction with another Hargreeves to be without Klaus. It doesn’t seem right. 

It shouldn’t be possible for his anxiety to spike any higher but panic will always find a way. What if Klaus was right, what if Dave’ll be stuck on this side now, like Ben and with Ben and without Klaus. What if he tries to will himself back home and he can’t find the portal anymore?

He can. It’s fine. It’s all fine. Well, not all of it.

Klaus is sitting with his knees tucked up to his chest on the bench right there on the other side. He puts his feet down and props his chin in his hand when he sees Dave. “Hey,” he says. 

He looks like Klaus. He looks the same as any other time he’s been here. Dave’s pulse is still pounding anyway. “Holy shit,” he says.

“Yeah.” With a crooked pout of his bottom lip, Klaus shrugs, like this is just how life is sometimes. 

It isn’t. Life doesn’t do that sometimes - death does. “Holy shit, Klaus. Are you okay?”

Stupidest question ever. Dave only asks because he’s still so frazzled from seeing the demolition site that was Klaus’ ribcage. Bodies aren’t supposed to have such cavernous dents in them, certainly not there, definitely not Klaus’. And there’d been blood everywhere, slicking between the crevices of Klaus’ clenched fingers as he used all his strength to support his siblings. All the strength he had left after he was eviscerated while supporting his siblings.

With a blasé wave of his hand, Klaus answers him anyway. “Oh yeah. I mean, I’m dead, but I’ll be fine.”

“Holy shit.” Dave rakes his hand through his hair and sits heavily beside him on the bench. It’d be great if he could come up with something new to say, but his brain is stuck. Images and sounds of the horrifying death of the person he loves the most, and all that. It’s a little overwhelming. 

After some hesitation, Klaus says, “Did you know, it’s actually really hard to come up with a conversation starter after that?”

“No kidding.”

That doesn’t function well as an opener itself. Neither of them says anything else.

Dave can appreciate that Klaus will be fine, and that they are sitting here next to each other having a conversation. Or about to have a conversation. But he still can’t stop seeing it, his heart is still racing from it. The blood he couldn’t stop, the tearing of things inside Klaus that should never even be touched. He keeps hearing it. 

Dave twines his fingers with Klaus’ to remember that he’s there. They’re here, together; they’re both here together. For now. He tightens his grip.

“I think,” says Klaus, “that went objectively worse than the dinner party.”

In spite of it all, that makes Dave snort, which surely was the intention. “You didn’t even introduce me to your family. I had to go off of physical descriptions - she’s short with brown hair, he’s got a horrifying squid monster coming out of his stomach, that sort of thing.”

“It is unbelievable, isn’t it? An adult woman being that short?” 

“Right, that was what was the most crazy.”

“You get used to it.”

Klaus can’t be painting everything that happened in that courtyard with the same deliberately underwhelming brush. Dave won’t allow it. “Klaus.”

“No, no. Not that. That was…” He’s quick to clarify, HELLO tracing lightly across his collarbone. “That was pretty bad.”

It’s as good an opening as any. “How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been better,” Klaus nods conversationally. “Yeah, there have been other points in my life that I wouldn’t have called bright spots, not at the time, but where my chest cavity wasn’t being used by a death robot to make an organ smoothie, so.” A shiver runs up his goosebumped arm. “I guess I’ll have that as a silver lining for a long time.”

Dave wants rub his arm and soothe away the fear there, but he’s not sure what’s okay between them, right now.

“Actually, though, I’ve been better.” Klaus clears his throat and keeps his gaze straight ahead. “Actually better. Besides the smoothie thing, I’ve been good.”

Dave mimics the posture. Klaus being good is good news. Obviously. It’s a small part of himself, one that he doesn’t like, that lets out a sigh of relief when Klaus continues with, “It was really not good for a while there, though.” Dave hates himself.

Pushing renewed pep into his tone, Klaus says, “Hey, did you know, I’ve been taking - ”

Dave really hates himself. “You’re not taking drugs again?” Klaus had been doing so well, Dave can’t be the one who made him fall off the wagon. Made him fall off the wagon and get shredded by a metal monster.

“Yeah!” Klaus says. “Anti-depressants. Can you believe? Me? Depressed?” It’s a joke, but it’s not a joke. He’s not looking for an answer. “But anyway. I don’t think they get in the way of all of this stuff.” He wiggles his fingers at the world around them. “I have this theory that the drugs messing with my powers are why I didn’t know about this before. If I’m high when I - when I come over here, I don’t remember, or something.”

“You won’t remember?” If Klaus forgets about this, the last thing he’ll remember is Dave showing up to say precisely nothing and then help him get murdered. His queasy stomach twists.

“No, that’s what I’m saying, I don’t think these drugs do that. Constant medication is, unfortunately, not the same thing as being constantly high. But I think that’s why it took me so long to figure it out. Which, you know, is pretty on brand for me. An optimist would call that better late than never, I suppose.”

“Not sure an optimist would say that about dying.”

“An optimist who had my life would. So a person who could never exist.” Klaus chuffs a laugh. “It’s almost an actual, useful superpower, at least. I’m not such a liability to have around since it doesn’t matter what happens to me; people don’t have to worry about me.”

Dave worries about him.

“Christ, if we’d known when we were kids, Ben wouldn’t have thrown his life away. He would still be - ”

Dave has read the book. He’d heard an edited version of Klaus’ side of the story back in ‘Nam. Not including the school-kid getup and the eldritch horrors, but alluding to some kind of accident that his brother had saved him from only to die himself. While his siblings’ behavior today supports this theory that no one is too bothered about saving Klaus when they know he can come back to life, Dave is 100% certain that Klaus is wrong about Ben’s death being his fault. 

He also takes issue with the implication inherent in the phrase ‘thrown his life away,’ but Klaus is still talking and Dave doesn’t interrupt.

“But then dad would’ve known, too, and that isn’t - that’s not a thought that’s good to think about.” Klaus breaks off with a full body shudder. Then he chuckles. “I’d be even more of a fuck-up than I am already, with that childhood.”

The childhood of torture at the hands of his father. The thought of what further experiments that man might have done to an immortal Klaus makes Dave shudder, too.

“Still. It’d be worth it. Whatever that old bastard would have done, Ben would still be alive. Fuck, we both would.”

“I hate your dad,” Dave blurts out.

Klaus leans back dramatically and flattens his fingers on his chest like he’s shocked and touched. “Thank you.”

“I read the book.”

The tendons in Klaus’ wrist jump, like he’s going to pull his hand away, but he doesn’t. Carefully, he asks, “So what was it you wanted to talk to me about then?”

It reminds Dave of the time he was called into the principal’s office in primary school. It had been about nothing important, but it was during the same week as the one and only time he cheated on a quiz, and he’d gone to the office like he was heading to the gallows. When he’d sat down, he’d been sure that Mr. Latham knew all about his misdeeds and was going to read him the riot act and send him packing, and that he deserved every bit of punishment. 

“I know you didn’t want me to read it - ”

“It’s fine,” Klaus says tightly, but that’s not the point Dave’s trying to get at here.

“But you said that was because it was a harsh look at your siblings. You also said it was a true look at you.” The cheery birdsong brightening up the street doesn’t fit with the dense air between them. As soon as Dave thinks it, the trilling dries up. Which isn’t exactly an improvement. When he swallows, it’s audible in the new silence. “I don’t think that’s true, and I don’t think you really understand what I was upset about last time. I need you to understand about that.”

Given that Dave has been having variations of this speech in his head for weeks, it shouldn’t take him as long as it does to form what he wants to say next. He takes long enough that Klaus thinks he’s waiting for an answer.

Klaus clears his throat before he says, “There’s a lot that I sort of kept from you, about my life. The details about parts of my past and about parts of my life now. And that - I shouldn’t have - I get why you are mad about that.”

“I am mad,” Dave admits, and it’s clear that Klaus still misunderstands because of the way he tilts away and tries to make himself less noticeable. He probably doesn’t even realize that he’s doing it, and that makes Dave mad, too. “But not at you. I’m mad that you’ve had to live through such shitty things, and I’m mad at the people who made it happen and the people who fucking watched it happen and didn’t do anything and let you think that it was okay. I’m mad at all the people who could have taken care of you and didn’t.

“I’m mad that people hurt you and acted like that wasn’t important and made you think that you aren’t important, because you deserve so much better than that. So I am mad that you didn’t tell me things, but I’m mad because I think you kept things from me because you thought it didn’t matter because you think you don’t matter, and I’m mad that I didn’t know and that means I could have done a better job of taking care of you myself.”  
He cuts himself off so he can catch his breath, and his voice returns, it’s subdued. “I’m mad at anyone who hurts you, Klaus. And sometimes that’s me, and sometimes that’s even you.”

Somehow, it took him putting it into words for Dave to realize that anger is what he’s feeling about all of this. He would have said he was upset or horrified or sad, but now that he’s said the word ‘mad’ ten times in a row, he knows it’s accurate. He feels better after saying it, too.

He sits long enough in this realization that he forgets about saying the important part, and Klaus speaks up for him. “So you weren’t a fan of the daily suicides then, either.”

Past the strangling grip that sentence puts in his chest, Dave says emphatically, “No. I’m not. And that’s why I don’t want to see you like this, not because I don’t want to see you.” The lawn across the street blurs with the hot tears that spring to fill his eyes. “I want to see you. I want to see you all the time.”

To his right, there’s a sniffle. It shouldn’t make him laugh, but he chuckles. Klaus makes a questioning noise and Dave tries to explain. “Here we are, two tragic gays, crying on a bench in paradise.” Klaus snorts, because of course he finds it funny in the way that Dave does; one of the first things that drew them together was that shared sense of humor. It makes him smile and it makes him sad.

“Damn it, God is such a _bitch!_” With a lot of feeling but not a lot of heat, Klaus throws his head back and shouts it up at the sky. Then he leans into Dave’s shoulder with a sigh. “She may not hate gays. But she does hate me, which is annoyingly relatable.”

“Um,” Dave says. “What?”

“Teenage girl on a bike, big hat. If you see her, maybe you can talk some sense into her. You’re charming.”

“Sure.” It’s not clear what he’s agreeing to, but he doesn’t think it’s actually going to come up.

“But in the long shot case where that doesn’t work out, what do we do?”

Dave thinks about every tickling inch of his skin where Klaus’ hair brushes up against his neck in the slight breeze, because he’s already spent plenty of time thinking about Klaus’ question, and he still doesn’t have an answer. He could sift his fingers through those curls to catalogue every sensation of that, too, but then he’d have to let Klaus’ hand go, and that won’t do. 

He buries a kiss on the top of Klaus’ head, then rests his cheek there. “Let me come visit you.” He whispers it like a prayer.

“Dave,” Klaus protests weakly, “my powers, you know I can’t - ”

“Not for long, not all the time,” Dave promises. “And if I get stuck, I’ll be with you. I’m not worried about wearing out my welcome.” 

“Okay, you getting to use that argument feels a little unfair.”

“I’m not worried about getting stuck, either. I believe in you. You’ll figure everything out.”

Klaus huffs. “Oh, everything? Is that all?” It’s sarcastic, but it isn’t a no.

It smells like grass and rain out here. A sleepy summertime storm is rolling in, thunder rumbling soothingly in the distance. It’ll soak anyone who stays outside, but with cocoa and slippers and a book, it could be the coziest afternoon from the other side of the window.

With a little whine, Klaus bunches up the front of his too-small pastel tie-dye shirt. When the implication of this action hits him, Dave jumps back. He needs to get a good look at him - a statement that is in general always true but specifically true today about specifically Klaus’ torso. He needs reassurances that it’s not ground beef.

“Just a little twinge,” Klaus tells him. “But it means I don’t have too long left.”

A sparkling tear slips down between those unreasonably long eyelashes. Dave cups his face and gently smooths it away. Klaus leans into his touch.

‘This is true love,’ Dave thinks. They’ll accept this helpless heartache, for now. Even if their story is a star-crossed tragedy, they can still hold on to each other. And as the sun falls into an early slumber behind the trees and evening birds start cooing, Dave remembers that on this side of things, he can change the stars.

So Dave hangs up his apron, reshelves his cookbooks, and gets back into traveling. He doesn’t go over there every day, he can respect that Klaus is nervous about that. It’s not never, though, and that’s such a massive improvement that Dave’s sure not complaining.

He meets the family properly pretty quickly. Unlike Dave, Klaus doesn’t get the luxury of keeping his love all to himself because Dave pops up at a random time, right into the middle of a family meeting. Klaus is sitting cross legged on an ottoman pulled up by the side table. His elbows are propped up on his knees, and he is studiously trying to ignore the spirit in the corner. She is wailing and literally tearing out clumps of her long hair. Klaus is gnawing on his fingernails and staring straight ahead at nothing.

Apparently, it’s a fairly effective technique for zoning out, because he nearly topples off his seat when Dave leans in by his ear and says his name. “Christ!” Klaus shouts, clutching his chest.

“What is it?” Diego leaps to his feet, a knife suddenly in both hands. Klaus hadn’t over-exaggerated in describing his hypervigilant vigilante brother, then. 

From a chair at the far side of the couch, Five says coolly, “Didn’t know Klaus could see Him, too.”

Klaus beams at Dave and Diego relaxes his stance. “Is it Dave?”

“Hey babe,” Klaus says. “Yeah.”

“So do we finally get to meet him?” Allison asks from her spot on the sofa next to Luther. It’s clear from the unanimous ruckus of agreement that most of them think that hoarding Dave’s visits to himself is what Klaus has been doing this whole time. 

Dave nods furiously when Klaus checks with him. “I’d love to.”

“Fine.” Klaus heaves a put-upon sigh and rolls his neck. “But the only one I’ve only gotten any good at doing this with is Ben, and I’m not sure how it will go with both of you.”

Everyone talks at once, a chorus Dave eventually gets used to because that’s sort of how they always talk when they’re all together. Vanya asks, “Can we help?” while Five puts in a droll, “Was everyone else starting to think that Dave was a made-up, Canadian boyfriend?” and Ben adds, “Right, like, ‘You’ve never met him, he’s from 1968. I’d introduce you, but he’s dead, so. But he’s totally definitely real. And totally the greatest.’”

Klaus clenches his fists and scrunches up his face in concentration. Even in a room full of famous superheroes, Dave’s still got his eyes on just one person.

“At least you’ve heard that much. I hardly know anything about him,” says Luther, managing to pull off an impressively effective pout for such an intimidating looking guy.

“No offense, but you’re not exactly the ‘boy talk’ type.”

Luther takes indignant offense at Ben’s words anyway. “I could be!”

“Can everybody just shut up?” Klaus snaps, and they do. Even the ghost in the corner cuts it out for a moment.

“Do you - ” Luther starts, but Allison nudges him in the side.

“Shhh,” she whispers. “He can do this.” Dave decides he likes her.

Ben, perched next to her on the arm of the couch, goes dim all of a sudden, like the dial for exposure was turned halfway down. Slowly, his body warms back up to its previous brightness, and that’s when Dave feels six pairs of eyes boring into him. He can’t see or hear the moaning spirit anymore, and Klaus is watching his siblings’ reactions.

“Hi,” Dave says. “I’m Dave, and I’m not Canadian.”

Ben is the first to pick his jaw up off the floor. Being dead yourself takes some of the shock and awe out of seeing ghosts. “But are you, as I’ve heard many times, the best person Klaus has ever met?”

“Depends who else he’s met.”

“No one good,” Diego tells him, and sticks out his hand to shake. “Everyone he knows is terrible. I’m Diego.” Their palms sink through each other.

“Sorry,” Klaus says. “I can’t really keep all of that going, I’m not very good at it.”

Dave turns to tell him, “Hey, no, it’s fine.” At the same time, Diego says, “Not a problem, bro.” The look of approval shared between them means more than a handshake ever could.

“How wonderful that the two of you were able to meet,” Allison says. 

“Yeah, fighting commies in the Vietnam War,” Five says with a smirk that Dave isn’t sure how to read. Is he underlining the awkwardness of the situation, or skeptical of their story, or something entirely different? Either way, it sucks the air out of the room.

Vanya breaks the tension. “I’ve had worst first dates.”

“You literally met Delores in the apocalypse, Five,” says Luther. 

The conversation flows on around them, more for Dave to listen to than take part in. They talk over each other as they tell stories and ask questions, and they get distracted from listening for the answers when bickering breaks out. With seven of them going at it, there’s always something to argue over.

It would actually be kind of perfect, if only Klaus could sit with his back curved into Dave’s side, using him like an armchair the way they like to do. But they can’t even hold hands in that silent form of support they’d had when Klaus had met Dave’s family. Klaus looks like he could use some, too; by the time the group frays apart, he’s worn out, from nerves or from superpowers or both.

In a conversational lull, Five says, “Well, I have other stuff to do,” and pops out of the room in a burst of blue. 

Luther grimaces. “Sorry. He just… does that.” He hustles out, maybe to give his brother a piece of his mind. Normally, there’d be reason to be concerned about a guy his size taking on a thirteen-year-old, but Dave’s not worried about Five. 

“And _they_ do that.” Allison rolls her eyes.

It doesn’t take much longer for the rest of them to disperse, their curious eyes tracing Dave’s ghostly form in one last appraising look. Even Ben follows Vanya out the door. Diego doesn’t.

He hangs back after everyone else has left, seemingly very engrossed in fiddling with his knives. Over and over, he flips one fluidly back and forth along his knuckles.

Klaus blows out an unimpressed breath and turns to Dave. “Okay, so you want to go - ”

“Hey,” says Diego.

“Yes, Diego?” Klaus drags out his name and lolls his head to glare at him. “What do you want?”

They all know that he wants something, but Diego shifts nervously now that he’s being asked outright. “I just - let me talk to Dave for a minute?”

Klaus uses the elementary school level of pedantic retort, “No one’s stopping you.” It’s no feat of impressive repartee, but it makes Diego’s mouth turn a surly sideways, so that must be why Klaus developed such a skill for childish taunting.

“On our own,” Diego growls.

“Alright, I am stopping you from that,” Klaus admits, his voice back to its usual floaty softness. “I’m wiped, I don’t think I could hold it up from the other room. Whatever you want to say, you can say to both of us.”

Diego almost drops his knife. He does his best to make it look intentional when he tucks it back into its sheath. “Not going to happen, bro.”

Klaus pounces onto this evident sore spot. “Why? What is it you wanted to talk about, _bro?_”

“No way.”

“I would probably just tell him whatever you said afterwards,” Dave offers.

“Yup. You don’t get to be alone with my boyfriend.” Klaus jauntily crosses his arms and raises his eyebrows when Diego sputters at the perceived insult. “It’s not my fault that you’re Stabby Knife Boy.”

“You just called me _what?”_

“You heard me.” Klaus says with sassy, serious eyes.

“Okay and what do you think’s going to happen?” Diego jabs at Dave with a knife that he’s suddenly holding again. “He’s dead!”

Klaus manages to make his expression even bigger, an award-winning example of conveying ‘what the fuck are you even _saying_ to me right now’ in one look.

“Fine.” Diego lifts his once again knife-less hands in surrender. “You want me to do this, then I’ll fucking do this, but just remember you asked for it.”

Obviously, Dave is enjoying all of this immensely, but that doesn’t mean he has any clue where this is going when Diego tears his eyes away from Klaus and fixes Dave with a grim look.

“I love my little brother,” he begins, only to be immediately interrupted.

“I’m older than you,” Klaus says.

“Even when he’s super annoying,” Diego continues, barely acknowledging Klaus’ input. “I guess families are supposed to do some kind of ‘don’t you ever hurt him’ talk, but I never have before, and,” he clears his throat, “a lot of people have hurt him before.”

Dave’s got something clogging his own ghostly throat, too, but he wouldn’t dare make a sound and stop this. It’s clear this is as hard for Diego to think about as it is for Dave.

“I don’t think you will - he actually really likes you.”

Dave’s lips quirk and he can’t help saying archly, “I noticed.” At his side, Klaus is pink, stuck between mortified and flattered. That’s fine with Dave.

“But still, if you do!” Diego points his index finger threateningly, throwing his entire body weight behind it. “Look, whatever man, I don’t care if you’re a ghost, there’s six of us and we have superpowers, so.”

“Appreciate it,” says Dave.

Klaus moans a strangled, “Oh my god,” from behind his hands. Dave’s being serious, though. He’s genuinely thrilled to hear this. Knowing Klaus has a family here who will do whatever it takes to stab a ghost for him is a really good thing. He hasn’t always had that, or he hasn’t always known. 

Dave’s not worried about any of them stabbing him. He gets to know them all better over the weeks, and it’s clear he’s fitting in when they start giving him a hard time. The family that roasts you is one that’s taking you in as one of their own.

Klaus doesn’t always go to the effort of making him visible, when he’s not feeling up for it or when they aren’t planning on being with the others for very long. In those times, the rest of his family get to hear only the one side of their conversations. Most of them are used to that after years of exposure, but when Klaus makes ghosts visible, they can only see and hear the living side of things.

“Alright, I need to issue a blanket, retroactive apology,” Ben announces to the room at large during a family meal that Klaus and an invisible Dave have been chatting through for fifteen minutes. “Not that it was ever really my fault, of course, but I didn’t realize before how truly annoying that is.”

Klaus blows him a kiss and tells him, “You can join us over here, if you want. It’s not like you need to eat.”

Ben is visible nearly constantly, and corporeal maybe fifty percent of that time. He and Klaus are very in tune, having spent half of their lives in each other’s company. It’s no surprise it takes more effort for Klaus to manifest Dave.

He uses Dave’s sometimes invisibility for tactical reasons, too, apparently. When someone’s giving him a hard time, he’ll pretend Dave is there by making some kind of comment to ‘Dave’s ghost.’ When Klaus tells him this, Dave has to ask what it is that he thinks invoking Dave’s presence could do to help.

“Peaches, they all love you. Naturally. Even Five, who would never admit it. And you were a soldier.” Klaus ticks reasons off on his long fingers. “You’re a ghost, so you can haunt them in their sleep. And you like _me,_ so they know you’re crazy.”

If Dave could, he would have kissed him then. He’s working on that.

Because he’s not always hanging out with the Hargreeves family. Dave is walking again, but this time on his side. He’s going to find Klaus’ only crossed over relative. He’s got some questions for Reginald Hargreeves.

As Klaus pointed out, Dave’s a soldier, and a ghost, and crazy. And in love with his son. He’s going to get those answers.

He’s had plenty of experience, too, crisscrossing the city for all those years. He hopes it won’t take as long over here, that maybe the helpful nature of this place will give him a hand. Reginald can’t be purposefully blocking him, because there’s no way he cares enough about following up with his kids to know that Dave even exists. 

He tries to target places that he thinks Reginald would like, but it’s hard to know what those would be. The areas he searches are selected for reasons that are not much more informed than random chance. He’s not giving up, but he’s also not making any noticeable progress until a night when he pops over to visit Klaus.

It’s been a little more than a week, in Dave time, since he’s been over there, but when he arrives, Klaus is asleep. That’s not a problem in itself; watching Klaus sleep has always been a hobby of Dave’s. Maybe that’s a little creepy, but it’s definitely part of a ghost’s job description, so now that he’s dead, he’s even more okay with it.

There’s no pressing time limit for him, either, not like there was the other way around, like if Dave had been out for the count when Klaus showed up on his side. Dave can always leave and come back later without it being a whole thing. It’s very low stakes, in comparison. The highs aren’t as high, with Klaus still not having a total lock on physically manifesting spirits, and especially not when the sorts of things Dave would like to do with a corporeal body tend to ruin his concentration. But the lows not being literally death is a fair exchange rate.

The trouble with Klaus sleeping during this visit in particular is that he’s having a nightmare, one that seems pretty rough, judging by the dewy tension coating the rough cords of his neck. The thin gray sheet is mostly draped off the side of the bed, revealing how his entire body is held shiveringly taut by the terrors haunting his dreams. 

Klaus has plenty of fodder for nightmares - he fought in a war, averted an apocalypse, and died more times than Dave can count. The nightmare plaguing him tonight isn’t about any of those things. Lately he’s been getting unedited versions of Klaus’ childhood stories, so he can recognize what piece of his past Klaus is dreaming of from the crying litany of “No,” and “I’m sorry,” and “Please,” and “Let me out.” They repeat, in too many hideous combinations, but the one that Dave might hate the most is, “I promise I’ll be better.” 

It’s a dream about the mausoleum. All of the tragedy in Klaus’ life, and what his father put him through as a child, more than half a lifetime ago, still hurts him sharply enough that it makes him sweat and whimper in his troubled sleep.

It makes Dave absolutely fucking furious.

Fury isn’t helpful for Klaus right now, and he’d like to be helpful, but that’s not really an option. The terror in his dream features ghosts shouting at him. Dave, the ghost, shouting at him to wake up might not be much of an improvement. It might not even work; it could just blend into the cacophony of angry spirits tormenting him. 

He is definitely an angry spirit. 

So he elects to take his temper away where it won’t make anything worse, screws his eyes shut, and pops back over to his side, entirely seething with useless rage against Reginald Hargreeves. When he opens his eyes, he is not where he has always returned, on the street by his house outside the portal. He’s standing in a dense, overgrown forest, a dozen yards from a boxy cabin built from a rich, red wood.

In all his time searching, this is not where he expected to find Reginald. Dave is absolutely certain that he’s inside.

Dave’s mother raised her son polite, but Klaus’ father didn’t raise his kids at all, so Dave barges in without knocking. The sound of liquid sloshing out of flasks the old man knocks over in his surprise is quite gratifying.

Because of course there are flasks and liquids. There’s also test tubes, and thick bundles of looping wires splayed across the wide countertops, and an enormous chalkboard that’s dusty with half-erased equations. It’s a very ‘mad scientist’ set-up, particularly the chilling empty metal dentist’s chair in the room’s center. 

“What are you doing here?” Reginald barks at him. “I have no interest in speaking with fans.”

“That’s just fine,” Dave says. “I’m not a fan.”

“Who are you? What do you want? You should leave this place at once.” He’s got a very strident way of speaking that leaves the person he’s haranguing with no time to answer his questions before he’s issuing orders. Dave is struck, once again, with a new level of understanding of how truly terrible Klaus’ childhood must have been. On top of the complete lack of nurturing, and besides the torturous experiments in a chair like the one Dave can’t look at, Klaus had to listen to this shrill, demanding voice all the time.

“I’m here about your son. Klaus.” He adds his name, because he doesn’t like the implication that Klaus somehow belongs to Reginald. “I want your advice so that I can help him learn more about how to use his powers.”

With a dismissive sneer, Reginald turns back to his work. “Number Four? What a waste.”

It’s crushing. The rage that was roiling red behind his eyes swoops down below his feet, an agonizingly swift plunge into unspeakable sadness. It’s the voice from Klaus’ head that Dave always wanted to strangle, because it was so harmful and so wrong, and it’s his own father.

“I tried with that one, over and over again, and got no results. You ought to forget all about him.” He underscores his points with jabs of his long pipette in Dave’s direction. “My children had incredible abilities, and they could achieve amazing feats if they believed they could, and acted appropriately. Number Four was always making excuses for his failure, but he was simply too obstinate and lazy. He will never amount to anything.”

Dave’s a little dizzy. The bottom of his rib cage is paralyzed, like he can’t spare the movement when he has so much coiled up inside him. With feeling, he says, “What the fuck.”

Reginald’s prickly eyebrows snap into an even more severe scowl than the sharp one he was already wearing. “Excuse me?”

“No,” Dave says. He can’t punch Klaus’ insecurities in the face, but he can punch his dad. “Those are absolutely horrible things to say about anyone. They’re practically criminal to say to your _child.”_

“You have been corrupted by sentiment, young man! I did all I could for Number Four, but he was always too weak-willed. He purposefully threw away his potential. Shirked his responsibilities.” He shakes his head in two crisp, distinct motions. “I have no sympathy for such a disappointment.”

“If you’re disappointed in your kid, that’s not their fault, it’s yours!” Dave yells. He’s not sure where the pleading note in his voice is coming from, or why. He’s not going to convince this man of anything, and even if he did, it would hardly matter now. “You can’t get mad at a person for not fitting into a box that you picked out for them. Trying to force it is only going to break things. Broken kids, broken families.” 

Dave never got to have kids. He always knew he could never have kids. Before now, he wouldn’t have said he had a lot of opinions about raising children, but as all these words pour out of him, it hits him that he’s actually spent a lot of time thinking it. He wishes he and Klaus had gotten the chance. 

He’s calmer when he says, “If you are disappointed in who your kid is, that’s not on them. The disappointment is you. If your kid grows up unloved, _you_ are the failure. Your most important job is to make sure they know they’re loved.”

The strange part is he’s not just calmer - he’s grinning now, because there is a rush in his chest, a swelling high of joy that he can’t contain. It’s a tragedy that Klaus had a childhood without love, but the two of them together make for one breathtakingly spectacular goddamn masterpiece.

Klaus is loved, and Dave is too, because they love one another. So, so so much. Dave is never going to stop doing this job. He might make mistakes, but he’s never going to quit, and it’s a job he is privileged to be allowed to do, every day, from now until forever.

Reginald is going on about some exceptionalist ‘he’s allowed to hurt his kids because they should have been special enough to handle it,’ bullshit. “I was preparing him, preparing them all, for a greater purpose that he insisted on shying away from - ”

“Saving the world, you mean? No, he did that. They all handled that already. And you know what caused the apocalypse in the first place?” Dave knows there are more caveats to the whole messy situation, but he also knows that this simple answer is right. “You did, champ!” 

Reginald’s face is apoplectic. Dave would be worried he was about to drop dead from fury, but he’s already dead and also Dave doesn’t give a shit. He lets him sputter livid syllables as he steps outside, but turns back once before he leaves.

“The things they’ve achieved is not because of you, it’s in spite of you. You’ll never be a part of that. Congratulations on the massive success of your life’s work, asshole.” He flips Reg off and pulls the door closed.

“What a fucking moron.”

Dave can’t disagree. For most of Dave’s recap of his conversation with Reginald, Klaus had listened in rapt attention, his wide expression an even split between shock and delight. When he’d gotten to his profane grand finale, Klaus fell on his side in a fit of laughter that lasted for multiple minutes and had him wiping away tears when he could finally sit up again.

“I wish I could have seen his face. I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere near it, but I wish you’d snapped a pic for me.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Dave had said, faux-contrite, since he knew Klaus was nowhere near upset about any piece of this story. He hadn’t been able to stop a self-satisfied smirk from stealing over his face.

“You…” Klaus shook a scolding finger at him, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself from biting his bottom lip, or chase away the thrill sparking up his eyes. He just gave in. “I want to fuck you so bad right now. No! I want _you_ to fuck _me.”_

Dave would happily oblige, but neither option is very possible until Klaus learns a few tricks. With all the ranting and well-deserved obscenities, he had forgotten his main goal in seeing Reg was to get some pointers for Klaus’ powers. When he tells Klaus his only takeaway - Reginald said that his kids could do great things if they believed they could - Klaus’ stunned response is about the same as Dave’s.

“What a spectacularly magnificent idiot,” Klaus reiterates now, leaning his back onto the bed frame from his spot sprawled on the floor. “Can you believe I was raised by the world’s stupidest man?” Since he can’t touch Dave, he puts silencing fingers up to his own mouth. “Don’t say it. I set you up too easily for that. Apple not far from the tree, all that, it’s low hanging fruit. Beneath you.”

Dave would never. It’s not even true; if Reginald is an apple tree, Klaus is an orange, and he didn’t fall from anywhere. Klaus is an orange on a jet plane. He’s a peach tree.

The spirit shambling through the hall outside Klaus’ bedroom passes the cracked open door again. The victim of a motorcycle accident coming off the exit ramp from the interstate that cuts though the city a few blocks away. He isn’t loud and demanding, not yet, probably just confused. Once he realizes that the hook in his stomach is pulling him towards a living person who can see and hear him, that will likely no longer be the case. 

Until then, Klaus tries not to draw any attention to himself. He picks a sock up off the floor and wads it into a tighter and tighter ball. When he speaks again, his voice is low. 

“When Dad locked me up in that place, he thought it would teach me how to use my superpowers or something, right? But the thing I learned, more than anything, was that it didn’t matter whatever ‘abilities’ I might have - I was powerless. Completely. Couldn’t get out, couldn’t make it stop. Couldn’t make _him_ stop. People on the news would call me a superhero, but I couldn’t save myself, not ever. And I couldn’t get anyone else to want to save me, either.” He throws the sock across the room. It bounces off the wall before it falls. “But all this time, his big, important, not-foolproof-enough method was that I just had to fucking believe in myself.”

He laughs, in that empty way he laughs when it’s about his father. “Christ. Sir Reginald Hargreeves, brilliant billionaire pioneer of extreme negging as a parenting technique. Fabulous.”

His distant gaze is a sure sign that he’s not actually seeing his messy room, or at least not in it’s current state. He’s lost in memories. Dave is remembering the other night, the choked sobs Klaus had made in his sleep. But dwelling on the echoes of Klaus’ past doesn’t do anything to help them move forward.

He says, “Do you want to hear any more about the color he turned? His face was like a tomato.”

Klaus comes back to himself with a soft smile. “It’s not like I’m ever going to get tired of hearing it.” Tucking his legs criss-crossed under him, he fans his palms out, setting the imaginary stage. “Take it from the top, baby.”

The power of belief isn’t easy. Or very specific.

“I think it was probably more like an in general kind of bootstraps sentiment, you know? Your average motivational poster, ‘you can do whatever you set your mind to,’ catchprase kind of thing.” Klaus’ words come out slanted. He’s holding a cigarette between his pinched lips trying to light it.

It’s a possibility. The whole thing is a bit of a long shot. As Klaus has pointed out before, on previous days of earlier, fruitless attempts, it wasn’t like the Hargreeves had all-purpose magic powers. “It’s not like I could float if I wanted, or whatever.” But Dave had pointed out then that you can’t really prove a negative. There’s not really any way for them to know that Klaus _can’t_ astral project over to the afterlife. Plus, he hadn’t known when he manifested Ben that he could do that, either. There’s all sorts of untapped skills Klaus might be harboring. 

“If anyone could do this, it’s you,” Dave says.

“Out of all the people with death superpowers, I’m the likeliest to succeed or the only-est one you know?”

“Yes,” Dave says helpfully. 

Klaus snorts. “Yeah, thought so.”

Dave scoots closer across the wooden floor. “Look, you want this. You are so full of determination. You worked so hard to get over to me before.”

“That was as easy as falling off a bike,” Klaus grumbles. “Hey, actually, have I ever told you about the first time I rode a bike? Obviously I never learned as a kid, so I was 21, and extremely under at least three distinct influences - ”

“And a bicycle legally counts as vehicle in this state, yup, I remember. Come on, can we try five more minutes without getting distracted?” 

Dave’s been trying to figure out the fine balance of being supportive, of encouraging him with a little push, but not toppling over the edge into demanding. Klaus definitely does not need more of that kind of teaching in his life, and honestly, Dave is fine if this is all they ever get. If he just gets to sit translucent besides Klaus for eternity and share in each other’s company. It’s more than he thought he would get for a long, dark while. 

It’s possible for Klaus to do more, though, Dave really believes that. That’s why he’s got to keep pulling. The ‘more that Klaus can do' might never be making easy trips over to Dave’s peace, but it could end up being the key for him to banish the ghosts and give himself some peace of his own.

Klaus tries. He wiggles to get rid of his fidgety energy and takes a deep breath that relaxes his shoulders when he lets it out. He wipes his face into a neutral expression and closes his eyes. Dave’s not timing it, but he doesn’t think it’s a full 15 seconds before his brow quirks and furrows, animating whatever conversation he’s having in his head.

“It’s just weird, with you sitting there watching me,” Klaus complains. “Isn’t it weird?”

It’s as good a motivation as any. “Okay, I’ll leave. Come and see me over there.”

“No! Don’t leave.” 

In an instant, Dave feels it, a pressure at his back like an arm thrown over his shoulders. He’d gotten comfortable coming over here, he’d forgotten to be worried about it, but this is it. This is what Ben feels, why he’s never been able to find his way over.

He thinks, stupidly, about the pale purple orchid he was growing and how it’s such a fussy plant and how it won’t ever flower without him to take care of it. Stupid, because it’s the afterlife, even flowers there can’t die. So really, the problem is that Dave won’t be there to see it bloom. He’ll be stuck here with Klaus, and while that is infinitely better than being stuck there without him, being stuck at all is an uncomfortable feeling. 

Maybe Rachel can take care of it for him.

Quieter, calmer, Klaus says, “Please stay.” He opens his eyes and the weight lifts.

“Did you feel that? What just happened?” His hearing gets echoey and strange, like going through a tunnel, and then his ears pop and Dave is sure he can get back home. It’s all very back to normal. “Do you know what you just did?”

“Yeah,” Klaus says, his voice hollow with awe. “I think I do.”

It’s a skill neither of them were particularly trying to unlock, but only because they hadn’t thought of it before. Whenever ghosts happen to come by, which, since it’s Klaus, is plenty often, he’s found a way to unhook them from the living side and show them the way to go home. He’s tried explaining how it feels, but it’s some kind of superpowered sensation that Dave can’t draw a regular person comparison to. Or a regular ghost person comparison, anyway.

However it works, it cuts down the hauntings by a good chunk. Not everyone wants to come over here. Ben, for one, certainly seems more comfortable back over there, and some are not much more than emotional residue that can’t cross over. With sudden deaths, though, most of the wandering spirits are simply confused. Klaus helps them find peace.

That’s not nothing - besides saving some lost souls, it’s a good sign that more abilities might click into place. Maybe let him push away the ones that won’t leave, or conjure up specific people if he needs. He and Diego could be a detective duo with Klaus able to call up the victims and ask. It’s also a skill that’s specifically connected to crossing the border between here and there, so Dave’s hopeful. They haven’t focused specifically on that in a while since they are honing this one, but he thinks it can happen, someday.

For now, he’s back at his little house with his orchid. He’s transporting it from a pot inside to live in the flower beds in his yard, and it needs to be brought in and out for a number of days to grow accustomed to the sunlight. Not too much longer, though, and it’ll be replanted outside and soaking up sun for as long as it’s in the sky.

Some weeds have sprouted up in the spot that he cleared for it, and he’s pulling them up when something about the air shifts behind him.

Blinking a few times, Klaus slowly comes into himself. His gaze latches onto Dave and he goes radiant. They must have a matching set of dopey grins on their faces.

Then Klaus launches himself across the yard at Dave and they tumble to the ground, a heap of fitted limbs and dew-drop kisses and love so big it could crack the world and so strong it could sew it back up again.

When Klaus finally manages to pull away and gasp a breath, he holds onto Dave, HELLO and GOODBYE hidden by the smooth curve of Dave’s sun-kissed face. Klaus laughs softly and whispers in wonder, “Holy shit.”

Yeah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you soooo much everyone for reading and commenting!!! I've had a great weekend getting to put this story out there and hear what people think of it! 
> 
> In a bit of shameless self-promotion, if you want to see my terribly sad Ben's death headcanon that Dave sort of mentions in this chapter, you could check out a series of [pre-canon fics](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1379650) I wrote for this show (this fic is more of happy ending than either of those stories get, but I bet if you liked the style here you'd like those).
> 
> And you can totally drop into [my tumblr](http://www.hermitreunited.tumblr.com/) inbox and be friends, I love writing friends and friends to yell about this show with! Thanks for sharing this weekend with me, you lovelies <3 <3


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